Word: craning
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...they smoke marijuana instead of tobacco. But the central characters in Easy Rider are as remote as the freedom they are seeking. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) is a vague, unshaven pothead who likes to refer to himself as "Captain America." His manic sidekick Billy (Dennis Hopper) has a droopy Stephen Crane mustache and shiny eyes fixed on some wild interior vision. Flush from the profits of dope selling, the cyclists symbolically cast off their wristwatches and head for that persistent American symbol of adventure, The Road...
...knew his Whitman "like a book," Robert Lowell has written, but Whitman was too great an invitation to incoherence, and "The Bridge" is at times incoherent. Crane admitted that in some of his short lyrics the words were chosen in fits of wine-induced ecstasy to the blare of jazz on a victrola. The idea was that the thoughts would blend and fertilize each other magically. Indeed, a few of the individual lyrics have come to seem as imperishable as Blake's. But the magic failed, so the 1920 critics said, when applied to the epic that Crane...
Flung Typewriters. Today, however, the splendor of Crane's intention is winning him a more tolerant audience. This is especially true among poets sharing his faith in the word as "object." It is also true among academic critics like Columbia's John Unterecker, whose Voyager is the second serious study of Crane's life to appear since Philip Horton's adventurous Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet...
...expensive, documented from all sides, Voyager pays Crane the usual tribute of trying to understand him in perspective. This isn't always easy. The word was actually "made flesh" for Crane in love affairs with sailors. He threw typewriters out of windows. "I saw all the trees below his window festooned with the typewriter ribbon," a friend remembers. Still, Unterecker cautions, "if Crane tossed out of windows everything that his acquaintances have him tossing, most of America, half of Europe, and all of Mexico would still be littered with far-flung typewriters." He invaded the lives of his many...
Greeting Cards. It appears that to enter into the mysterious personality from which the poems came, as well as the problem of why the poems were so few, it is necessary not only to know Crane but to know his divorced parents as well. His father, a successful self-made candy manufacturer, was the inventor of Life Savers; his mother, unhappy, nervous, was preternaturally possessive. Crane and each of his parents, Unterecker explains, "concerned with immense problems, anxiously kept them from the other two." Yet each kept "guessing and misunderstanding the motives and actions of the others." To know this...