0.1 Afterword  (Page 7/9)

This is a textual condition designed to expose the limits of positive knowledge. The graphic design of The Black Riders literally demonstrates how meaning comes in positive, deliverable quantities. But when they come, their material concreteness—their quantifiable status—measures their limits. Crane’s unregenerate linguistic text forecasts, summons, the emergenceof those measures, which regenerate the desire to know more (to know more about what we think we know): " let me into the darkness again. "

So a crucial virtue follows from an interpretive reading that takes a form as positive and arresting as this book’s graphicaldesign. Academic interpretation customarily appears in an expository prose conceived as self-transparent—as if the commentator knows whereof he writes, as if he were bringing “a great light”to the situation. Even when the interpreter discusses his target subjects as ambiguous, dark, or contradictory, the prose discussions do not normally mark their own declarations as ambiguous, dark,or contradictory. But that is precisely what follows from the decision to make an intellectual issue of the forms of expression.

And that Copeland and Day raised such an issue is plain from the reception that the book received. Praising The Black Riders in a review in The Bookman , Harry Thurston Peck was clearly caught off guard by the graphic design. “Mr. Stephen Crane is the AubreyBeardsley of poetry,” his review began—“a true poet” because like “Mr. Beardsley with all his absurdities [he]is none the less a master of black and white” (Weatherford, 63). Peck is responding primarily to the graphic design—the “lines” of the book—and less to its “poetry” as such. Not knowinghow to deal with that graphic design, Peck—like the many reviewers who would parody the book—dismissed it as “mere eccentricity of form,” irrelevant to the majesty of Crane’s “verse.” Thirty years later,Amy Lowell will take a similar line when she argues that the neglect of Crane’s poetic “virility and harsh passion” was the fault of “his various publishers,” who cast his work in ludicrous decadentforms.

These responses have had the experience of The Black Riders but have missed the meaning. Copeland and Day’s design, however, goes to the heart of the matter, reading the poems in the same dark aesthetic spiritthat the author writ. They do not tell us what Crane’s enigmatic lines mean—they demonstrate how they mean.

We can see the interpretive situation better by making an experiment with one of Crane’s pieces. Number X is especially useful because it was twice graphically interpreted—first byCopeland and Day and a short while later by Melanie Norton. Here are the lines in relatively plain text form:

Should the wide world roll away

Leaving black terror

Limitless night,

Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand

Would be to me essential

If thou and thy white arms were there

And the fall to doom a long way.

Crane is migrating Byron, and even more Poe, Byron’s avatar, into free verse. The radical artifice cultivatedby those famous precursors is here vulgarized to a mixed style emphasized by the stumbling inelegance of line 5 (“Would be to me essential”). Yet the lines seems to preserve a kind of residual poeticformality, as if they half remembered, in a debased time or a distracted way, the glory that was Byron and the grandeur that was Poe: lines 1 and 2 rhyme (accidentally?) with lines 6 and 7, and the workpivots on line 4, which operates simultaneously in the grammar of lines 1-3 and that of lines 5-7.