In contrast to Eliot (although influenced by him), Hart Crane considers myth in a less severe and more anticipatory manner. Crane cannot subordinate himself to old myths and recycle them: “The great mythologies of the past (including the Church) are deprived of enough façade to even launch good raillery against” (Crane 1966, p. 218). In contrast to Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism, Crane’s spiritual vision, following that of Whitman, is deeply American: “I feel persuaded that here [in America] are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual quantities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere” (Crane 1966, p. 219). Hence the poet, in the famous last lines of “To Brooklyn Bridge,” beseeches the bridge to “sweep, descend/And of the curveship lend a myth to God” (Crane 1966, p. 46). This new myth, envisioned through the technologies of modern life, comes into being because “New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation” (Crane 1966, p. 222).
According to Allen Grossman, “Crane tended in his poetry to hallucinate mechanisms, and structures, to repeat the problem of form as image as a way of searching for, voyaging toward … the space he sought, where all the powers and justly desired outcomes of sentiment would be simultaneously at home” (Grossman 1997, p. 102). Grossman calls these image-forms “Orphic machines.” Another more familiar term for them might be archetypes, just as the space which Grossman tells us that Crane sought might be called the collective unconscious. For C. G. Jung, the archetype is a “primordial image… that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure” (Jung 1961, p. 81). Mythic or archetypal thinking is inescapable when one considers modern poetry and belief: “The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life” (Jung 1961, p. 82). Sounding like Eliot, Jung sees this process as rectifying “the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present” (Jung 1961, pp. 82–83), though as we see in regard to Crane, archetypal thinking—and writing—need not be socially reactionary in the way in which it connects contemporary life with primordial myth.
This leads us back to the question as to whether the loss of myth under the conditions of modernity is itself a myth. The status of myth under modern conditions is ambiguous, indeterminate; it is, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s term, “myth interrupted.” If the secularism of enlightenment is a myth, then myth is a myth as well. As Nancy puts it, “The phrase ‘myth is a myth’ harbors simultaneously and in the same thought a disabused irony (‘foundation is a fiction’) and an onto-poetico-logical affirmation (‘fiction is a foundation’). This is why myth is interrupted. It is interrupted by its myth” (Nancy 1991, p. 55). If this is the case, then the self-consciousness of modern archetypal thinking always undermines itself; it is part of the destabilized dialectic of reason and belief. As Nancy tell us, “A name has been given to this voice of interruption: literature” (Nancy 1991, p. 63). Let us see how this plays out among modern poets.
Redemptive Poetics
“It is the belief and not the god that counts” (Stevens 1990, p. 188), writes Wallace Stevens in his Adagia (1934–1940). For Stevens, belief remains a necessity even after the death of God, and the importance of poetry grows proportionately: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” (Stevens 1990, 185). Poetry can redeem us, it can save us, for apparently, we still need saving, even, or perhaps especially, in a godless world. In Stevens’ view, “Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry” (Stevens 1990, 190). Hence his use of the term essence: poetry is something intangible—a spirit or idea—which we experience in words, though it is by no means only its words: “Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.” And yet “In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all” (Stevens 1990, p. 188)—an adage in which one hears an echo of the commandment of Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” We cannot love the essence of poetry, perhaps because it is beyond us in its very intangibility. Rather, we must love the words. Therefore, writes Stevens, “It is possible to establish aesthetics in the individual mind as immeasurably a greater thing than religion” (Stevens 1990, p. 192), codifying a notion that Stevens puts forward years before in “Sunday Morning,” when his female persona recognizes that “Divinity must live within herself,” that “All pleasures and all pains…are the measures destined for her soul” (Stevens 1954, p. 67).
Stevens’ aestheticism is predicated upon the need for belief, but that need can no longer be fulfilled by traditional religion. “Christianity is an exhausted culture” (Stevens 1990, p. 202), he declares; “God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry” (Stevens 1990, p. 193). But if, as he insists, “The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself” (Stevens 1990, p. 188), then a problem arises. In the Adagia, as in much of his poetry, the question of belief is related to the poetic identity, the poet. But the question of poetry and belief arises for readers of poetry too. What does reading poetry do for us? Can we really believe that poetry makes life complete? Here, Stevens is suspended between two paradigms. “The poet is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live,” he asserts, “and, also, between people as between themselves; but not between people and some other world” (Stevens 1990, p. 189). Given the movement of Stevens’ aphorisms, we would assume that the poet does not serve as intermediary between people and some other world because there is no other world, because there is only “reality,” which is “the spirit’s true centre” (Stevens 1990, p. 201). But “[the] poet,” he also insists, “is the priest of the invisible” (Stevens 1990, p. 195), a notion also found in his poem “The Man on the Dump.” Stevens cannot dispense with the idea that the poet is a priest, engaging in sacramental rites of communion, even if these rites are solely of this world, material, and entirely human. They are social too, in that they are between people and themselves. Yet if the poet does not mediate between people and some other world, why is he still the priest of the invisible? What can be “invisible” and still be of this world? Or as the poet asks in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Whose spirit is this?” (Stevens 1954, p. 129).
Perhaps an answer may be found in Stevens’ late poem, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”: “We say God and the imagination are one…” (Stevens 1954, p. 524). Here, the union of the poet and his muse counteracts the poverty of a reality without poetry, without the idea of order. This union produces “a light, a power, the miraculous influence,” and in the grip of that power, the lovers “feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, / A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, // Within its vital boundary, in the mind.” That godlike power is the imagination, offering a vision of the cosmic order, and “out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air,/In which being there together is enough” (Stevens 1954, p. 524).
The idea