‘Exploiting magnificence’: Hart Crane versus T. S. Eliot on the matter of diction

Abstract

Critics have long noted the fact that Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) can be read as an optimistic response to the pessimism of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). As Langdon Hammer has persuasively argued, Crane’s species of modernism rejects the representation of early twentieth century society as in decline or decay by showing it to be in the process of ascent or becoming. Yet, the nut and bolts of Crane’s rejection have yet to be analysed in relation to Eliot’s poetry and criticism. In this paper, by contrasting passages of The Bridge and The Waste Land, I demonstrate that diction is one of the key ways Crane affirms, contra Eliot, aspects of modernity. While Eliot argued, throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s, that accurately portraying the twentieth century required a language similar to contemporary speech, Crane flouted this tenet, instead deploying ‘magniloquence’–a term Eliot used to deprecatingly describe elements of Milton’s poetry and James Joyce’s prose. Crane’s The Bridge can be read, therefore, as a text which manages to do what Eliot thought not only impracticable, but impossible: represent the modern world resplendently.