`The World Has Funked Them'

In a letter he wrote to his friend Gorham Munson on Oct. 20, 1920, Hart Crane expressed sentiments familiar to many young men from the provinces:

“I shall be glad to get back to Cleveland for a while, if only to see the copies of Vildrac, Rimbaud, and Laforgue that have arrived from Paris since my leaving.”

When we are young, culture is always elsewhere. One’s home, by definition, represents the tired, conventional way of doing things, and must be repudiated. Crane ordered precious volumes from France. In his Cleveland, 45 years later, I plundered libraries and bookstores, searching for anything, including Rimbaud, to take me elsewhere. Neither of us had learned the lesson suggested by an unlikely source, D.H. Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature:

“The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them today.”

Like Crane, I later defunked Melville and Whitman.