[lit-ideas] Re: American poetic scene at the beginning of 72
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 13:34:12 -0700
Lawrence wrote:
> it was commonly believed among poets, painters, and novelists that drinking
> enhanced one's talent. One could more readily reach one's muse under the
> influence.
Hart Crane comes immediately to mind. There's a good discussion of
Crane and his place in American letters, including some vignettes of his
encounters with his drunken muse, in a discussion of his work on the occasion
of his being given a volume of the Library of America.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/061009crbo_books1
'Crane was almost unique in preferring to write while he was actually drunk.
Malcolm Cowley, in ?Exile?s Return,? his memoir of New York and Paris in
the nineteen-twenties, recalled the way Crane would slip away from a
bacchanalian party to write verse:
'Gradually he would fall silent, and a little later he disappeared. In lulls
that began to interrupt the laughter, now Hart was gone, we would hear a new
hubbub through the walls of his room--the phonograph playing a Cuban rumba, the
typewriter clacking simultaneously; then the phonograph would run down and the
typewriter stop while Hart changed the record, perhaps to a torch song, perhaps
to Ravel's ?Bolero.?. . . An hour later . . . he would appear in the kitchen
or on the croquet court, his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already
iron-gray hair bristling straight up from his skull. . . . In his hands would
be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript, with words crossed out and
new lines scrawled in. ?R-read that,? he would say. ?Isn't that the
grreatest poem ever written?? '
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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