'I Suppose Age Brings Context'

An old friend and former blogger in England has been reading Anthony Hecht and detects what he calls “a very faint ghost of Hart Crane at times.” It’s not a connection I have ever made but I recognize a certain lushness of diction in both of them. 

“[I]t's a similar sense of being suddenly hooked & exalted by the sound of the lines,” he writes, “though he's much more concrete, deliberate, intellectual, than Crane. Crane is kind of the adolescent version of Hecht, I love them both but am unsure how my love of HC will stand up to a re-reading.”

 

Mine hasn’t. As a high-school student I was initially drawn to Crane’s work because we shared a Cleveland, Ohio connection. He is fundamentally a young person’s poet – a young person with a taste for sometimes overripe language. A poet friend and I in the Seventies turned a pub crawl into a pilgrimage, drinking at Crane’s favorite watering holes in downtown Cleveland. Our tour guide was a biography of Crane. Today, his work no longer interests me, which is not the same as saying he is a lousy poet. He is for others to enjoy. People often like and dislike writers for extra-literary reasons, including fashion and a desire not to be considered unsophisticated. My friend writes:

 

“Unlike you, I never really turn against old literary loves, but I have cooled against some books I loved in my youth; I suppose age brings context, it's as if a little treasure I once contemplated in a small chamber is now set in the middle of a vast dark hall, and long shadows fall about it: it seems okay, fine for what it is, but that’s all.”

 

Well put. It’s true: I have often shed once-passionate devotions to writers, books and genres. I had a brief but all-consuming infatuation with science fiction, Doc Savage and the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs around the ages of twelve and thirteen. To me, that sounds age-appropriate. A little later came my crush on Thomas Wolfe, especially Look Homeward, Angel. I went so far as memorizing him: “Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?” That’s a pure distillation of adolescent angst. Plus, I hadn’t yet shed a taste for overwriting.

 

I’m convinced that the works of certain writers are best appreciated by readers at certain ages. I first read Proust at age twenty – twenty years too soon. A handful of writers I have read early and often, and they have aged proportionally with me – Bunyan, Swift, Defoe. Then I think of the Crane-like good writers I’m unlikely to read ever again, starting with James Joyce, which leaves me feeling a little wistful but with good memories.

 

My English friend adds: “Incidentally, in German Hecht means pike (the fish). Were I a poet, I would write a poem called ‘The Pike and the Crane,’ but I lack that gift.”