From Plymouth Rock to Palo Alto: The New England literary tradition and its American critics

Abstract

Although the relationship of Hart Crane and Yvor Winters has been much discussed, there has been no sustained critical attempt to consider Winters’s analysis of Crane’s suicidal enchantment as a point of entry into his larger diagnosis of American culture. This article examines how Winters's critical achievement and poetry, plus that of Robert Frost, help American literature to exorcise the ghost of Hart Crane. They also free the American intellectual and literary tradition from what may appear an incoherent, triumphalist mythology, and offer in its place a brilliant, suave, but sober understanding of ourselves, of the world, and of our place within it: one that does not reject the symbolic power of reality or the American continent, but which does seek to comprehend it by means of chastened perceptions and a solider reason. The achievement of Winters and Frost should serve as foundational for a mature literary culture in America.