angelic artist in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, The

Renascence, Fall 2000 by O'Gorman, Farrell

CRANE had been a close friend of Tate's, and the essay conveys a strong sense of his own involvement in what he saw as Crane's-whom he elsewhere called "our twentieth-century poet as hero-artistic dilemma" (Essays 328). While largely affectionate toward Crane in calling him "one of the great masters of the romantic movement," Tate's primary purpose in writing the piece is to articulate what he sees as the profound limitations of that movement. Crane's "aesthetic problem" was the "historic problem of romanticism," first hinted at in Tate's statement that the poet was probably "incapable of the formal discipline of a classical education." Crane's poetry reveals the limitations of romanticism in that it has not only "defects of the surface, it has a defect of vision" (310-11); it fails to engage with the world as it is. The locked-in sensibility, the insulated egoism, of his poetry conflicts with the ordinary forms of experience, and his portrayal of a reality where objects are not distinguished from one another reveals his "implicit pantheism" (313). While the "impulse in The Bridge is religious, . . . the soundness of an impulse is no warrant that it will create a sound art form" (317). In all of these statements we see Tate's proclivity for a rigorous and demanding formal aesthetic which communicates the realities of the concrete world.

And, Tate continues, Crane as romantic was completely unaware of the split between his own consciousness and that world. The Bridge is an ill-conceived attack upon what Crane perceived as Eliot's "pessimism"which in Tate's estimation is founded on real insight into "the decay of individual consciousness and its fixed relations to the world," but which Crane mistakenly sees as "pure orneryness" in the face of the wonders of the mechanical age. Crane's "vagueness of purpose, in spite of the apparently concrete character of the Brooklyn Bridge, which became the symbol of his epic, he never succeeded in correcting" (314). Such vagueness is characteristic of the undisciplined romantic imagination, which has no sense of limitation and therefore of form: the fifteen parts of The Bridge taken as one poem suffer from the lack of a coherent structure, whether symbolic or narrative .... The single symbolic image, in which the whole poem centers, is at one moment the actual Brooklyn Bridge; at another, it is any bridge or "connection"; at still another, it is a philosophical pun and becomes the basis of a series of analogies. (314)

Tate's understanding of language comes to the foreground in this analysis, and he finally draws a clear connection-one consistent with his work in such essays as "Literature as Knowledge"-between a properly grounded sensibility, skillfully employed language, and realistic engagement with the world. He finally assesses The Bridge as a cautionary example of the product of a romantic imagination that is very much akin to the dreamlike Apollonian-agnostic imagination Lynch had decried. As such it is fundamentally opposed to the sacramental imagination best represented for Tate by Dante: