9 - The Farther Shore: Poems

Summary

In an essay on Emerson, Kenneth Burke translates a famous line from the Aeneid: “And they stretched forth their hands, through love of the farther shore.” Burke then expands in a direction that the author of the present study also tries to follow: “The machinery of language is so made that things are necessarily placed in terms of a range broader than the terms for those things themselves. And thereby, in even the toughest or tiniest of terminologies … we stretch forth our hands through love of a farther shore; that is to say, we consider things in terms of a broader scope than the terms for those particular things themselves.” Taking that remark as a cue, this chapter considers a scope broad enough to embrace Crane's major poems, with the goal, inter alia, of letting them talk to one another and to their totality; and with the further idea of letting that totality speak to whatever farther shore of meaning Crane's “lines” variously point toward. I believe this is part at least of what Burke means by “beyonding,” and that such an approach accords with Crane's own view of his poetic corpus: “I suppose I ought to be thankful to ‘The Red Badge,’ but I am much fonder of my little book of poems, ‘The Black Riders.’ The reason, perhaps, is that it was a more ambitious effort. My aim was to comprehend in it the thoughts I have had about life in general, while ‘The Red Badge’ is a mere episode in life, an amplification” (Letters, p. 79).