A letter to the editor

As I am ill, neurotic and insecure, I have taken the executive decision to spare my readers a post today (Readers? ...A cricket is heard chirping in the distance). Instead, oh delight of delights, I thought I would upload a letter of mine to the magazine Poetry which didn't quite make the cut this time round.

To provide a little context, there was a feature in the magazine's October issue and also, at an earlier point, in the New York Times, laying into one of my all time favourite poets so, myself, in my new role as self-appointed defender of the deceased, decided to wade into the debate...

***

Dear Editor,

Although William Logan is entitled to his opinion of Hart Crane and has every right to defend these views ["The Hart Crane Controversy," October 2008], I take issue with the bitter and parochial tone of his attacks upon the poet. Furthermore, “A critic’s take on his critics” seems more concerned with addressing superficial objections to the original article, rather than tackling the manifest prejudice of that first piece.

Logan’s Times’ review was a lazy piece of character assassination, rather than an honest engagement with the poet’s work, taking issue with everything from Crane’s lack of formal education, to his debauched lifestyle and homosexuality; even his spelling. Need we forget that some of these criticisms can be levelled against several of the most prominent names in the canon, including Betjeman, Byron, and, in the case of the last, the patriarchal Chaucer? Personally, I would much prefer it if Crane’s ideas were lifted from ‘the daily paper’ or a ‘high-school textbook’ but if they are, then I have yet to locate them there. I also disagree that the well-travelled, cosmopolitan Crane is ‘closer to a peasant poet like John Clare’, taking this is an example of the most ardent snobbery.

The article’s formal criticisms included a vague complaint that the poems’ “showed more style than talent”, as well as the unsupported assertion that imagery such as “the pirouettes of any pliant cane” constitute deliberate “obscurity” and conspire to create a “dreadful mess”. In fact, the poem in question, “Chaplinesque” employs very specific imagery in relation to its subject matter and is among one of the most linear and concrete examples of the poet’s work. In my opinion, such an evocative line eclipses some of the much more blasé examples of imagery in modern American poetry, such as the line, “The morning was a painting” in Logan’s own poem, “The Ship”. In other places, Logan has wilfully misrepresented or else misunderstood Crane’s “Logic of Metaphor”, which focused on the sound and connotations of certain words, rather than their precise definitions; any unfavourable comparison with Elliot is thus, necessarily, void.

On the subject of “Chaplinesque”, I am also at a loss to understand why Logan chose Angelina Jolie as a suitable comparison for Charlie Chaplin in his discussion of the latter’s visit to the poet. One is a genius, an artist and a genuinely talented dramatist, the other is Angelina Jolie. Such an obvious incongruity strikes me as wholly unnecessary, except as a vulgar exercise in levity!

Whether or not Logan picked the right ocean, seems to me, the least of his problems...

NEIL HAMPTON
London, England

***

Well, there we are! I'll write more in a few days...