Hart Crane’s White Buildings has two sections. The opening section includes all the book’s poems but one, and the second section, preceded by its own title page, “Voyages,” includes that one poem, which has six parts. The opening section’s poems are appreciable on their own, but they also prepare for “Voyages” by leading readers to a threshold.

Reading the first section’s poems primes readers to cross said threshold, which will take them to confront, in the final stanza of the last section of “Voyages,” Crane’s “imaged Word.” This is Crane’s poetic word wrought to a quietly apocalyptic pitch: “The imaged Word, it is, that holds / Hushed willows anchored in its glow. / It is the unbetrayable reply / Whose accent no farewell can know” (58).

Yet never mind the readers. At the opening of White Buildings is the poet ready for this crossing to his “imaged Word”? The first section shows Crane wrestling fully to accede to his incarnation as a poet.

The book begins with the poem “Legend,” in which Crane announces his moth-to-flame and flame-to-moth commitment to imagination: “For the moth / Bends no more than the still / Imploring flame” (3). If, as for the ancient Greeks, Crane’s moth images the psyche, then the “Imploring flame” would be the daemon enticing the moth toward creative realization in destruction. But here, at the book’s outset, when the poet repeatedly “Spends out himself again” in quest of the real presence of imaginative vision, to achieve that vision proves elusive, as the poet attains an eidolon only: “Twice and twice / (Again the smoking souvenir, / Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again” (3). The poem then closes by placing in the future a full realization of poethood that “Shall,” but has yet to be, achieved (4).

The word “eidolon” comes from Greek and refers to a phantom, an insubstantial shade, a mortal’s hovering disincarnate double. To whose eidolon does Crane refer?

A lover’s perhaps? In the Iliad, after Patroclus dies by Hector’s spear and Achilles retrieves the bloody corpse, Patroclus’s eidolon visits Achilles in a dream and demands a proper burial.

Or is the eidolon “Legend” evokes that of a poetic ideal?

In White Buildings Crane quests for “erotic” and “poetic” to become two adjectives describing one experience, so, just for kicks, imagine for a moment the eidolon of “Legend” to be that of Arthur Rimbaud, bloodied from the gunshot wound his lover Paul Verlaine inflicted upon him.

From the Rimbaud of Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) Crane receives the injunction, “Il faut être absolument modern”: “One must be absolutely modern” (Season 88, 89). And Crane takes his epigraph for White Buildings from Rimbaud’s prose poem “Enfance” (“Childhood”): “Ce ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avançant” (Illuminations 28). How should readers translate this line? Here is John Ashbery’s effort: “It can only be the end of the world, as you move forward” (29).

In “Enfance,” “la fin du monde” refers as much to a spatial limit as to an end of time, as when Canadians refer to the northern reaches of Labrador as la fin du monde, the end of the world. This brings us to White Building’s “North Labrador,” a poem of three brief stanzas.

Does this poem take place in the present, in the future, or in an ice-age past, when the flowing Labradorean Ice Sheet covered North Labrador, a school topic in the 1910s (see Lukens)? The poem’s movement into eternity perhaps moots this question.

In the poem topics of White Buildings come into focus.

First there is the topic of thresholds and crossings: “A land of leaning ice / Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky, / Flings itself silently / Into eternity” (21). The ice perpetually crossing under a perpetually arching sky becomes what the Plato of the Timaeus would call a moving image of eternity. And the poem will claim that, amidst the ice, to move forward, to cross beneath the skiey arches, can only be the world’s end.

Then there is the topic of call and response, of question and answer. The second stanza quotes an unspecified speaker posing questions to the icescape: “Has no one come here to win you, / Or left you with the faintest blush / Upon your glittering breasts? / Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright?” (21).

Indicating this question goes without reply, the last stanza suggests an ice-age setting, a place without world: “Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments / That journey toward no Spring— / No birth, no death, no time, nor sun / In answer” (21). On the ice beneath the threshold the sky’s arch forms, world has ended. The speaker calls out in question, yet with answer being absent, the landscape toward which he speaks remains, as his addressee, an eidolon he posits rather than an entity responsive to him. Here, there may be entrance into eternity, but as a solitude inhabited by the speaker’s personification alone.

The topic of the liminal, of a crossing or a passage as an apocalyptic transformation and realization pervades White Buildings. “Emblems of Conduct” exalts “joy” “Luring the living into spiritual gates,” yet by the poem’s end these gates become remembrances: “Dolphins still played, arching the horizons, / But only to build memories of spiritual gates” (6). At such gates transformation beckons as an attainment of Rimbaud’s absolute modernity, a modernity entailing a transformation of experience of and in the living flesh, and so the poet drives toward “New thresholds, new anatomies!,” as the poem “The Wine Menagerie” exclaims (33).

The book’s final threshold, the crossing from the land-based first section to the ocean poem “Voyages,” finds a rehearsal in “Repose of Rivers.” This poem of a visionary Mississippi flowing past New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico performs the general movement of White Buildings, taking the reader from a series of terrestrial settings to a threshold opening toward the sea.

At this threshold, sight and sound turn synesthetic: “The monsoon cut across the delta / At gulf gates … There, beyond the dykes // I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer, / And willows could not hold more steady sound” (23). Notice the gates. Among the poems of White Building’s first section, “Repose of Rivers” most formidably brings the reader to the threshold of achieved poetic vision, rivalled in this by “Possessions.” Yet, being a poem of memory, “Repose of Rivers” still treats of eidola, memorial images, stand-in doubles for poetic vision itself. Consider Crane’s beloved William Blake insisting “the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration” to be imagination’s true muses (95).  

“Legend” exclaims, “It is to be learned— / This cleaving and this burning” (3). Like several other poems in the first section of White Buildings, “Possessions” tracks a burning out that is a burning through to the fire of imagination. “Possessions” recounts the poet’s nights cruising for sex with men, with the poet writing of these encounters as if spilling blood “Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns / Record of rage and partial appetites” (26). Yet this process opens toward what Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell insists imagination’s apocalyptic fire will yield, poetic vision: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite” (39), though we should imagine Crane receiving Blake’s admonition colored by Rimbaud’s program for “the thief of fire”: “The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, massive, and reasoned disordering of all the senses” (Drunken 231, 230).

As Harold Bloom points out, “Possessions” ends with an allusion to Revelation 2:17 (430), which intimates the senses opening (“He that hath an ear, let him hear”) and has Christ promise a new name: “To him that overcometh will I give […] a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that recieveth it.” At the end of “Possessions,” Crane revises this promise into the pledge of an inner fire: “The pure possession, the inclusive cloud / Whose heart is fire shall come,—the white wind rase / All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays” (26). “Voyages VI” will revise Revelation’s promise of a “new name” as the promise of the name “poet.” Here, in “Possessions,” the wind and fire of imaginative vision remain to come.

The opening section of White Buildings builds toward two climactic poems, “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” and “At Melville’s Tomb.” “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” brings the topic of the eidolon to an apotheosis and a close. “At Melville’s Tomb” brings the topic of mortality to an apotheosis and a close.

To ponder “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” recall a few career highlights of Helen’s eidolon. In Homer’s Iliad, at Troy, Achaeans and Trojans war over Helen, the loveliest of women. But was Helen actually there, or did the Trojan prince Paris abduct to Troy merely an eidolon of Helen? The warred-over Helen, the poet Stesichorus claimed, was an eidolon, as Socrates mentions in Plato’s Republic to denounce the shadows men pursue, such as “the phantom [εἴδωλον, eidolon] of Helen that Stesichorus says the men at Troy fought over out of ignorance of the truth” (268). Helen’s eidolon goes on to haunt and entice Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, as she does Faust in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play Faust.

In “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” Crane exalts yet underlines the eidolon status of his Helen: the poet sacrifices the “substance drilled and spent beyond repair / For golden, or the shadow of golden hair” (43). Like one of Homer’s warriors fighting to the mortal end over an eidolon of Helen, in “For the Marriage” the poet offers up his “substance” for a “shadow.”

Crane modernizes Helen’s eidolon as a media image. An urban office worker commuting home but forgetting “The fare and transfer” and so having to turn pedestrian, the poet becomes “lost yet poised in traffic” (38). But in this manner he may find Helen’s “eyes across an aisle, / Still flickering with those prefigurations— / Prodigal, yet uncontested now, / Half-riant before the jerky window frame” (38). This window frame frames Helen’s face as if in a picture frame, in a photo, or even as in “jerky,” “flickering” frames of film, that medium still new in 1926.

This shadow Helen, up-to-date modern, dances at a rooftop jazz party, there enjoying the “New soothings, new amazements / That cornets introduce at every turn” (40). She is the idol of the poet’s “lone eye,” which discretely gazes upon her as “One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise” (39).

As Homer’s Helen motivates the Trojan War, Crane’s epitome of a modern eidolon associates with the mechanistic warfare of the Great War (WWI), and so with spilt blood, as at the poem’s close: “Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile / Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height / The imagination spans beyond despair, / Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer” (44).

Marlow’s Faustus and Goethe’s Faust fall for Helen, her eidolon, wishing union with her. Crane’s poem urges the completion of that union in marriage, husband and eidolon united until death do him part.

The last poem of White Building’s first section, the poem standing watch at the threshold opening to “Voyages,” is “At Melville’s Tomb.” The poem imagines Herman Melville’s shadow a sentinel to vast ocean waters, a realm of funerial oblivion. Here the wrecks of ships enter silence and the bones of the drowned enter obscurity, and, as in “North Labrador,” answer remains absent. The poem situates Melville’s eidolon at an end, an impasse, a limit.

Melville is buried in the Woodland Cemetery in the Bronx. “At Melville’s Tomb” treats of the sea as a graveyard and imagines Melville the sailor often seeing the “dice of drowned men’s bones” tossed “beneath the wave” (45). The poem ends with the sea becoming Melville’s true resting place, or at least his shadowy eidolon’s final abode, without prospect of resurrection: An elegiac song, a “Monody,” though sung “High in the azure steeps,” “shall not wake the mariner. / This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps” (45).

Inclusive of this use of “shadow” in “At Melville’s Tomb,” in the opening section of White Buildings the word appears no less than thirteen times in nine of the section’s twenty-two poems. After “At Melville’s Tomb” there is a blank page, the title page “Voyages,” another blank page, and then “Voyages I.” Past this gate from the opening to the final section of White Buildings the word shadow and the faux couple poet-and-eidolon do not go. Only the poet, shedding death’s mirage to encounter his muse at sea, makes this crossing.

Let us now cross to “Voyages,” a sequence of sea poems inspired by Emil Opffer, a sailor and Crane’s lover.

“Voyages I” underscores the irreversibility of Crane’s sojourn upon the ocean. On a beach children play, and though they cannot hear the poet already drifting out to sea, he would admonish them that “there is a line / You must not cross nor ever trust beyond” (49). The poet has crossed this line, having left behind a shore where “The sun beats lightning on the waves, / The waves fold thunder on the sand” (49). With these lightning-strewn and thunder-sounding waters, Crane evokes Genesis’s ocean chaos, there in the beginning, and the lightning and thunder punctuating the end in Revelation, as if Crane’s ocean waters restore those before, or foreshadow those after, the time and space of the creation.

With the falling away of space and time upon the ocean (“this great wink of eternity, / Of rimless floods” [50]), in “Voyages II” the sea becomes a “sceptered terror” whose music sounds, whose “diapason knells,” doom for all the destructible (50). This sea “rends” “All but the pieties of lovers’ hands” (50). The waters encircle the lovers in their indestructible love, so the poet and his beloved hear the sea’s music in another manner, as “sleep, death, desire, / Close round one instant in one floating flower” and the poet calls out, “Bequeath us to no earthly shore until / Is answered in the vortex of our grave / The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise” (50, 51).

“Voyages III” announces a quietly apocalyptic transformation, in which, “admitted through black swollen gates,” the poet, moving “Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, / Light wrestling there incessantly with light,” arrives to his beloved amidst the waves (“unto / Your body rocking!”), this ocean locale being a place “where death, if shed, / Presumes no carnage, but this single change,— / Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn / The silken skilled transmemberment of song” (52).

On the inner back dustjacket flap of White Buildings bibliophiles will find an advertisement for Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. Only in 1928 did Pound get his modernist slogan “make it new” into print (North). The Crane of White Buildings anticipates and perhaps influenced Pound’s demand. In White Buildings, the “modern” goes by the name “new,” as in the previously quoted demand, “New thresholds, new anatomies!” Yet, as Crane would have been aware, there is Revelation 21:5, in which at world’s end the enthroned Christ says, “Behold, I make all things new.”  

What is “new” in the “Voyages III” end of the world? In the New Testament, the suspension of death does presume carnage, Jesus’s crucifixion. So when Crane declares “death, if shed, / Presumes no carnage,” he departs from the New Testament, from a resurrection body presuming a “Bleeding eidolon” of said body on a cross. Yes, to his beloved’s body the “sea lifts, also, reliquary hands,” yet with these hands uplifting this body as holy, the apocalyptic shedding of death presumes merely a change arriving from “song,” Crane’s poetry.

To grasp this change, consider Epicurus’s logic noting death’s inexistence in experience: where I am, my death is not; where my death is, I am not. Death remains utterly unavailable to figuration. Epicurus’s logic reveals any positing of death as an abuse or misuse of language, a catachresis. Poetic immortality arrives with a poet shedding any catachresis of death from poetry’s figurations. Crane would shed any such through a “silken skilled transmemberment of song.” Rather than crucifixional dismemberment, we have poetical transmemberment.

In White Buildings Crane overlaps Christ with Dionysus (see the poem “Lachrymae Christi”), so, besides swerving from the crucifixion, his poetic transmemberment also revises Dionysiac and Orphic tradition, where the god or the poet undergoes sparagmos, dismemberment, a hint of which echoes today when someone suggests “tearing apart” a piece of writing.

On the strength of his poetry’s “silken skilled transmemberment of song,” the poet may enter the beloved’s embrace: “And so, […] / Permit me voyage, love, into your hands …” (52).

In “Voyages IV,” the beloved has taken to sea, and the poet awaits his return. The poet knows the “hours and days” of his waiting by observing the “spectrum of the sea” (53), the waters’ changing colors marking time’s passage (Irwin 359). With this “spectrum,” from James Joyce’s Ulysses Crane brings in Stephen Dedalus on seawaters: “Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs” (31). The poet reads the harbor waters as a signature of his beloved, whom he thinks of as word incarnate: “In signature of the incarnate word / The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling / Mutual blood” (54). Sidenote: An interesting essay would be to compare the Joycean seas of “Voyages” with those in Sandy Florian’s late modernist riff on Joyce, Florian’s novella Boxing the Compass, also about a lover lost to ocean waters.

“Voyages IV” describes the ocean, or the sea of love, as a finality the poet must enter to speak his love (“I / Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell” [53]) and where there is “No stream of greater love advancing now / Than, singing, this mortality alone / Through clay aflow immortally to you” (53). Notice the word “advancing,” and recall Crane’s Rimbaud epigraph, stating that, in advancing, it can only be the end of the world.

In the “Voyages” sequence, “Voyages V” shifts the tone, as the poet opens to the inevitable and irreversible loss of his beloved. In an upper story apartment bedroom, the beloved leans out an open window to take in the night harbor view and floats out of the poet’s world (“‘There’s / Nothing like this in the world,’ you say”) gazing into a “godless cleft of sky / Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing” (55). The poet cannot join in this view, due the narrowness of the window: “I cannot touch your hand and look / Too” (55). The view of the stars as “dead sands flashing” in a void or “godless cleft of sky” suggests, argues Lee Edelman, “the nothingness that undoes all couplings” (161). The poet and the beloved are at once confined within the room and vastly separated, the beloved already far away thinking of the sea, his “eyes already in the slant of drifting foam” (56). The sad calm of this poem allows readers to catch their breath before the savage incarnation of the poetical character in “Voyages VI.”

In “Voyages VI,” the poet’s lover is gone without return. Addressing the ocean tides as their “derelict and blinded guest // Waiting, afire, what name, unspoken, / I cannot claim,” the poet declares, “let thy waves rear / More savage than the death of kings, / Some splintered garland for the seer” (57). Afloat a timeless sea where every point centers a limitless circumference, the poet calls for the encircling horizon of fiercely cresting waves to figure a garland signaling his achieved poethood, his entrance to poetic vision as a “seer.” He makes this call awaiting a name, “poet,” he never can give himself but hopes to receive amidst an ocean vastly ready to extinguish the single spark (“afire”) his poetic self is. As promised in “Possessions,” the poet enters what William Butler Yeats in Per Amica Silentia Lunae calls “the condition of fire” (86). The moth has been given over to the flame.

In a letter to his friend Waldo Frank, dated 21 April 1924, about the sailor Opffer, Crane wrote, “I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructability” (Hammer and Weber 186). Crane’s world remained all too destructible. In “Voyages VI,” Crane aspires to touch upon the indestructible to find a reply invulnerable to farewell: “The imaged Word, it is, that holds / Hushed willows anchored in its glow. / It is the unbetrayable reply / Whose accent no farewell can know” (58).

From “bleeding eidolon,” to “signature of the incarnate word,” to “imaged Word”: this movement culminates in Crane fully realizing his imagination, bringing forth a new Word.

Ecclesiastes states, “There is no new thing under the sun” (1.9). Regardless of any readers’ trust in or indifference toward Yahweh, this phrase is useful here because it indicates how strictly a thread of tradition proscribes the possibility of any new creation: there is no new creation whatsoever, and any claim to such is idolatrous, Ecclesiastes argues, as Yahweh alone creates. To create anew defines the impossible.

In the first half of “Voyages VI,” Crane calls for a poet’s garland, and the second half of the poem would justify that call with the poet becoming the locus of an impossible event of new creation, that of his “imaged Word.” I do not write, “the poet does the impossible,” as the impossible exceeds the puissance of the “I,” exceeds any instance of “I can.” Percy Bysshe Shelley writes, “the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.” This could be revised as, “The poet, in the event of creation, is like a tree struck by lightning.” Or even: “like a spark cast into the ocean.”

Revelation’s making new amidst the world’s end Crane makes new. He does so in achieving the minute particulars of his poems in White Buildings, culminating in “Voyages,” and in the daemonic incarnation of his poetic word, by which creation in destruction he wins his name.

White Buildings appeared in 1926. Next year, in 2026, in terms of calendar time, readers will be as far away from White Buildings as the Crane of 1926 was from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, which appeared in 1826. In terms of poetry, Crane remains our contemporary, “modern,” even somewhere ahead, beckoning.

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