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The turn of the 20th century through the World Wars was a critical point in history for the poem and the genre of poetry. Old forms and themes started to fade and new forms and themes began to appear. A new theme that arose from the tumult and destruction of World War I was the landscape poem. Due to the destruction of the actual and objective landscape, these poems are subjective, positing the poet as the ultimate seer, blending the worldly with the extra-worldly, and describing the natural landscape or cityscape often using mythic allusions or using the landscape to achieve some other unnatural connection. Some examples of these landscape poems are Mina Loy’s “Lunar Baedeker,” Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.” Although the landscape poem is common, there are two iterations of this theme that work in very unique ways. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hart Crane’s The Bridge both offer a reader a similar epic form that is both grand and relatable, unlike that of their peers. The Bridge and The Waste Land are similar in thematic content, form, and diction, proven by data gathered from the text analysis tool Voyant, a close reading of the poems in totality, and close readings of individual sections.
According to the introduction of Hart Crane’s collected poetry written by Harold Bloom, from its first appearance in 1922, The Waste Land was Crane’s "inevitable antagonist" (Bloom xiv). Crane considered himself a descendant of Walt Whitman, meaning Crane believed that Eliot's doom and gloom had no place in poetry. From the moment he read The Waste Land, Crane sought to debunk it. Although, not only is Eliot’s doom and gloom more similar to Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd” than to Crane’s hope in a hard place, but also, Crane is similar to Eliot in content, form, and diction (xiv). As Bloom mentions in his introduction, the place where Eliot and Crane differ is exactly in that doom and the gloom, or the “vision” of the poem (xi). As proven by textual analysis and close reading, where Eliot is more negative, Crane is more positive about the same content of their masterpieces. Even though Crane and Eliot are working within the same form of the landscape poem, each writer uses the form for a different vision. Evidence for this claim can be found in a close reading of individual sections, using Voyant tools as evidence.
In this essay, I will use screenshots of data pulled from the Voyant Tools open-source textual analysis software. To use this software, a user develops a corpus of text. For this project, the majority of the corpuses have two documents which can be directly compared using Voyant. For example, I uploaded "The River" section of The Bridge and "The Fire Sermon" section of The Waste Land in order to directly compare the word usage of the two poems. Some of the initial and pertinent data that Voyant provides for me is the word count of each document, the most frequent appearing words of each document (common words), and the vocabulary density of each document. The vocabulary density tells me the percent of unique words the document contains in the form of a decimal value (i.e. .40). In addition to pertinent information about each of the documents separately, Voyant also provides data comparing the two documents. Continuing with "The River" and "The Fire Sermon" example, Voyant can tell me the most common words of both of these sections in totality. In the bar and line graph that I use most often in this project, Voyant places the relative frequency of each word in "The River" on a bar and connects it with a line to the relative frequency of the same words in "The Fire Sermon" in a bar on the other point on the graph. In addition to the relative frequency percents, Voyant also tells me the number of times each word is used in the total corpus in the summary section.
For the majority of this comparison of the epic poems, two sections of The Waste Land will be compared to two sections of The Bridge chosen based on initial thematic connections gleaned from close reading. However, it is suiting to begin with an analysis of the poems in their totality. From first glance, the two poems are similar in form, namely that they are both long, epic poems that are broken up into smaller, more digestible, and seemingly unrelated sections. However, The Waste Land consists of 3,032 words while The Bridge consists of 8,960 words. The Bridge greatly exceeds The Waste Land in length, but both poems have a similar density of vocabulary, as about 40% of the words in The Waste Land are unique and about 39% of The Bridge’s words are unique.
Even though there is a pretty large disparity in number of words, the similar vocabulary density of the two works create a viable corpus for word analysis (Voyant). Because of the high amount of unique words that each poem possesses, the common words between the two poems become invaluable. In other words, because The Waste Land and The Bridge use so many unique words, the words that they share will be crucial in examining how the poems are working in conjunction with each other. These common words of the entire poem continually show up in the cross-examination of individual sections in addition to the words unique to each section.
In looking at this bar graph, it becomes obvious that there are many common connections between the two works in totality. However, the more even connections, i.e. the lines in the middle clump of the graph, are the more important ones, as they are evenly relevant in both works. Words that have associated lines more parallel with the x-axis are more suited to describe the common words of both documents. Interestingly, in these relevant common words, there are words that one would expect to find in poems about landscape, such as sea, white, night, far, and long. The next graph is the relationship of these words in the entire corpus.
The other common words, however, are not ones that would be expected in a poem about landscape. They are words that suggest a sort of subjectivity; words that suggest a human filtration of the raw landscape data. Words like hair, hand, eyes, heart, left, new, dead, and time. These words suggest an emphasis on human interaction and the human sense of time and life.
Having these human words in the list of most common words suggests an ulterior motive within the landscape poem. The Bridge and The Waste Land, in other words, are both landscape poems which have the motivation to deal with other things, and these other things are similar in each poem, only to different ends, as Bloom suggests in his introduction of Crane. This connection and ultimate disparity between the two works becomes extremely evident within the comparison of the shorter sections.
The first poem sections that can be compared are “Burial of the Dead” and “Quaker Hill.” The first poem of Eliot’s masterpiece and the entire sixth section of Crane’s are very close in word length, Eliot’s section being only five words longer. The common words in each of the sections, therefore, reflect a strong connection between the two.
In alignment with the larger themes of the entire corpus, "Quaker Hill" and "The Burial of the Dead" both contain typical landscape words, such as land and snow, and atypical landscape words, such as eyes and heart. Focusing on the common words of dead, land, snow, knew, and hill, a comparison of close reading becomes available.
The two poem sections open with a scene of landscape and specifically, a scene about the landscape of a seasonal change. In “Quaker Hill,” Crane describes the warmer months of Spring as the “blend[ing] of March with August” (line 3). In “Burial of the Dead,” Spring is also described. The initial blend of March with August is April, and Eliot claims that “April is the cruellest month” as it “[breeds] / Lilacs out of the dead land” (line 1-2). Both opening stanzas contain two of the common words: snow and dead, or die in “Quaker Hill.” This commonality connotes a connection between Spring and a death brought from winter within the poems. For Crane, the death is the depletion of a cow’s food, forcing them to “die on last year’s stubble” (line 8). For Eliot, the death is of the land in general and of memory, as he claims winter “cover[s] / Earth in forgetful snow” (6-7). Even though the two poems don’t use the same exact words, the correlation between seasons' change and death is apparent, based on the evidence gleaned from the collocates tool in Voyant.
Both poems are talking about death collocated with seasons, as both poems use either the general word of "seasons" or the specific word of "April" and the collocate of "dead" or "die" (Voyant).
In addition to these versions of death, in the second stanza of “Quaker Hill” and the latter half of the first stanza of “Burial of the Dead,” the natural death is juxtaposed with human life, and more specifically human apathy. After describing the cows, Crane claims that an inclusive “we…[regard] them” (line 10), positioning humans as seeing the dying grass that feeds the cows and doing nothing about it. Eliot, on the other hand, creates a similar sort of human apathy by claiming a similar inclusive “us” was surprised by Summer (line 8). We did nothing to try and recall the memories that Winter covered in snow. We only “drank coffee, and talked for an hour” (line 11). Both poets claim apathy.
However apathetic the speakers of the poems claim the inclusive “we” to be, the speaker himself decides to take action by seeking knowledge in both cases, declaring agency for themselves out of an apathetic surrounding. In the graph of common words that exist between these two poems, the word knew appears. In the lines that connect the human apathy to the seeking of knowledge, the speaker continues to look at and describe the landscape, ultimately deciding that seeking knowledge would solve the problem of apathy. The speakers both use the word knew in the negative sense. In other words, the speakers juxtapose the apathetic human of not knowing with their proactivity. In “Burial,” the lack of knowledge is quite clear. Line 40 states “I knew nothing.” In “Quaker Hill,” the speaker asks a series of questions, the contents of which proving that he doesn’t know the ins and outs of the landscape at which he is looking (lines 46-48). Coming to the end of their knowledge, the speakers both proactively seek knowledge from a clairvoyant figure. For Crane, the speaker of “Quaker Hill” wants to travel into the heart of America, “farther than the scalped Yankee knew to go” (line 52). Thus, he asks “slain Iroquois to guide” him (line 51). In “Burial of the Dead,” the speaker feels “neither / Living nor dead” (line 39), and seeks advice from the Tarots of Madame Sosostris, as he feels as though knowledge of fate is the only wisdom. Both speakers break out of the cycle of apathy to seek knowledge.
Just as both speakers react to similarly to knowing nothing, both speakers react in the same way to the knowledge they receive: they descend their hills of what they think they know. In the list of common words, hill appears due to this descending of both speakers. The speaker of “Quaker Hill” uses the word descend three times, the last two examples actually descending the page of text. In correlation with the speaker of “Burial,” the speaker of “Quaker Hill” descends underground “from the hawk’s far stemming view” to a “worm’s eye” (lines 57-58). Descending, the speaker claims, is humbling. After the descending, we can “arise” (line 62). In the last lines, the speaker brings “Quaker Hill” full circle, as he seasonally relates the descent into humility as “leaf after autumnal leaf / break[s] off…” and “descend[s]” (lines 72-74). In “Burial of the Dead,” as given by the title of the poem, the descent is a burial. Also in a seasonal full-circle, the speaker asks if the corpse that descended below the ground “will bloom this year?” (line 72). This graph is a comparison of the collocated words dealing with the theme of descent and burial.
Just as Eliot suggests the dead must be buried, Crane suggests we must descend to a worm's eye view. Both of these word pairings are collocated the same amount of times within the poem sections, proving the similar importance of each idea (Voyant).
This similarity between the descent of both Crane and Eliot gives rise to the point at which they differ. Within the similar methods, and even similar words, Crane and Eliot are using “Quaker Hill” and “Burial of the Dead” for different visions, as Bloom suggests. While both poets talk about death, the dead that Crane talks about is in the past, while Eliot talks about the current crowd being dead. While Crane’s speaker tries to learn from the pain of his peers and predecessors, Emily and Isadora (line 65), Eliot’s is questioning the validity of his peer “Stetson,” claiming that the things he has planted are already dead (line 71-72). While Crane and Eliot work within similar scope, seasonal landscape images, the seeking of knowledge, and a burial, the conclusions that the two come to are different in the end.
Continuing through the sections of the poems, perhaps the most important comparison of the sections of The Bridge and The Waste Land is that of “The River” and “The Fire Sermon.” Both sections contain fragmented sentences, creating yet another layer of importance for the words that are common. These sections also contain the common words within the entire corpus, such as like and long. But focusing on the words her, river, city, eyes, hear, and home, the close reading between “The River” and “The Fire Sermon” arises.
First and foremost, the word “river” is perhaps the key to unlock both of these sections. Both Eliot and Crane are using their respective rivers as their muse for these sections. Eliot asks the “Sweet Thames” to “run softly till I end my song” (line 176). In addition to Crane’s title of his section, the general image of the river serves as the basis of all other images in his section. Initially, the flow of information through radio is compared to the flowing of a river in lines 1 through 19, as the fragmented flow of radio advertisements are described “without stones or / wires or even running brooks” (lines 16-17). The muse for Eliot and the flow of information for Crane culminate in the image of the river.
These images of the river are pivotal to understanding the modern landscape both poets are introducing. Both poets also depend on a reader’s sensory understanding of both rivers and modern cityscapes. Firstly, both poem sections connect the sounds of the rushing river to the sound of the rushing city. The common words used in this connected are city and hear. After invoking the Thames and pleading the river to keep running, Eliot’s speaker claims he “hear[s] / The rattle of bones” at his back (lines 185-186). In the next stanza, while the speaker is creeping along the river bank, he “hear[s] / The sound of horns and motors” (lines 196-197), connecting the sounds of the river with the sounds of the city through the speaker hearing them and representing them with the same textual form and diction. Similarly, Crane’s speaker connects the sounds of the city to the sounds of a river and ultimately conflates the river image with the city image. As aforementioned, the cityscape is compared to the image of the river in lines 15-19, but additionally, the “sound” of “whistling down the tracks” is invoked in lines 10-11. Crane’s speaker continues to blend the cityscape technology with the image of the river. He claims the telegram “wires...span the mountain stream” (line 25), and he conflates the travel of a river and the travel on train in lines 31-34 with the ambiguous “they” traveling “under a world of whistles” (line 31), invoking the sounds of trains to describe the rushing of rivers, “wires and steam” (line 31). Both Crane and Eliot use the sounds of trains and rivers to describe their respective cities, thus city, river, and hear become some of the common words.
Continuing in the theme of sensory expression after the sounds of the city are portrayed, both Crane and Eliot develop a seer figure, much like the clairvoyants in “Quaker Hill” and “Burial of the Dead.” Instead of the knowledge of the seer, Crane and Eliot are interested in the eyes of the seer. Thus, the common word eyes and the sense of sight becomes of utmost importance. In “Fire Sermon,” the classical Tiresias is the seer. Ironically, Tiresias is blind, but Eliot’s speaker claims that “though blind” (line 219), he “can see,” “perceive the scene, and fore[tell] the rest” (lines 220, 229). In other words, Tiresias knows what is about to happen in this scene that is developing. Tiresias might know this because he is an oracle, but Eliot’s speaker is also implying that this same narrative occurs so often that even a blind man could know what will happen. Regardless of how Tiresias knows the scene, his eyes, sight, and insight are crucial. Similarly, the speaker of “The River” claims he “used to see / Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery...hopping the slow freight...riding the rods” (line 53-54, 60, 61). In other words, the speaker of the poem sees the homeless using the trains and the rails to their advantage. Through his seeing, the speaker discovers that the homeless he watches knows something that normal train-riders do not. Just like Tiresias can see without eyes, the homeless “know a body under the wide rain” (line 65), and lurk across the land, “knowing [earth’s] yonder breast / Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue” (line 68-69). In these lines, earth is invoked as a woman, and further, a woman that the “hobo-trekkers” (line 56) know and have touched. In both “The River” and “The Fire Sermon” the seer figures see a scene, and this sensory perception of the eyes leads to a scene of invasion.
The scene which the seers see is a conquerous one. Through the sense of touch, both poem sections suggest an invasion of home by an outside source. In “The Fire Sermon,” this invasion is very literal and physical. Tiresias sees a typist’s home invaded by a carbuncular man. The man’s “exploring hands encounter no defense” (line 240) on account of the typist, and therefore exploits her. Tiresias is invoked again as the seer of this incident in lines 243-244. In “The River,” the exploitation is a bit more abstract but is just as important. The aforementioned “hobo-trekkers” that know the land with a deeper understanding might have gained that deeper understanding due to exploitative measures. Next to the stanza that claims the hobos know mother earth’s breast, there is an poet-included footnote that states “but who have touched her, knowing her without her name” (page 59). This statement implies a sense of invasion of the hobo-trekkers, using the land without understanding or knowing the true name of the earth, which is described as a woman. Just like Tiresias “[had] foresuffered all” (line 243) that happened in the scene with the typist, the seer in “The River” “knew her body there” and heard trains “wail into distances I knew were hers” (lines 79, 76). Both seers of the poem sections saw the exploitation process of a woman's home. For Tiresias, it was the physical exploitation of the typist, and for the speaker of “The River,” it was the exploitation of mother earth for the use of train tracks and hobos.
Interestingly, the word her is the most used word in the two documents collectively, but there is only one collocate word that appears in both "The River" and "The Fire Sermon" as demonstrated in this graph.
The word "her" is only collocated with the word "hair" in both texts, despite the word "her" occurring 17 times within the two poem sections. In both sections, after the initial indication of exploitation, when the women are described, their hair is singled out. Eliot relates that the typist "smoothes her hair" (line 455), and Crane claims "an eaglet's wing" was laid on the hair of mother earth (line 81). Both poets mention the hair of the exploited figures to address their attempt to return to normalcy after the exploitation. The typist smoothes her hair "with automatic hand" (line 455), as if this situation has occurred enough times to warrant an automatic reaction. The description of mother earth's hair with an eagle is a very natural one, and is one that was seen by the speaker before the invasion. Both woman figures crave normalcy after the invasion: smooth hair for the typist and creatures for mother earth.
However similar the themes of the two poem sections are, in agreement with Bloom’s statement, the end of the poems reveal the different motives of Crane and Eliot. In “The River” and “The Fire Sermon,” both poems describe the flow of the river. Further, both poems describe the eventual and inevitable flow of the rivers into the ocean. For Crane, this process is freedom. He claims the Mississippi river “flows within itself, heaps itself free” by embracing the “stinging sea” (lines 137, 139). Further, the river meeting the gulf causes “hosannas silently below” (144). For Eliot on the other hand, as he stands on the sandy shore watching the river flow, “[he] can connect / nothing with nothing” (line 301-302). The same scene of inevitable flow causes freedom for Crane and chaos for Eliot.
Works Cited
Benton, Cecil. T. S. Eliot. 1956. https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw18412/TS-Eliot
Bloom, Harold. “Introduction,” The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. Edited by Marc Simon, Liveright Publishing Company, 1986.
Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. Edited by Marc Simon, Liveright Publishing Company, 1986.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Seventh Edition, edited by Nina Baym, W. W. Norton & Company, YEAR, pp. 2045-2057.
Photo of Hart Crane, in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. https://allenginsberg.org/2015/07/jack-kerouac-and-hart-cranes-proclamations/
Sinclair, Stéfan, Geoffrey Rockwell and the Voyant Tools Team. 2012. Voyant Tools (web application).