Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Little: Early Writings
- 3 Conflict as Condition: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
- 4 Doing Without: George's Mother
- 5 Eternal Fact and Mere Locality: The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War
- 6 The Mysteries of Heroism and the Aesthetics of War: Army Tales and Other War Writings
- 7 Community and Crisis: “The Monster,” Tales of Whilomville, “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”
- 8 The Ethics of Their Condition and the Unreal Real: “The Open Boat,” “The Five White Mice”
- 9 The Farther Shore: Poems
- Notes
- Index
9 - The Farther Shore: Poems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Little: Early Writings
- 3 Conflict as Condition: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
- 4 Doing Without: George's Mother
- 5 Eternal Fact and Mere Locality: The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War
- 6 The Mysteries of Heroism and the Aesthetics of War: Army Tales and Other War Writings
- 7 Community and Crisis: “The Monster,” Tales of Whilomville, “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”
- 8 The Ethics of Their Condition and the Unreal Real: “The Open Boat,” “The Five White Mice”
- 9 The Farther Shore: Poems
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In an essay on Emerson, Kenneth Burke translates a famous line from the Aeneid: “And they stretched forth their hands, through love of the farther shore.” Burke then expands in a direction that the author of the present study also tries to follow: “The machinery of language is so made that things are necessarily placed in terms of a range broader than the terms for those things themselves. And thereby, in even the toughest or tiniest of terminologies … we stretch forth our hands through love of a farther shore; that is to say, we consider things in terms of a broader scope than the terms for those particular things themselves.” Taking that remark as a cue, this chapter considers a scope broad enough to embrace Crane's major poems, with the goal, inter alia, of letting them talk to one another and to their totality; and with the further idea of letting that totality speak to whatever farther shore of meaning Crane's “lines” variously point toward. I believe this is part at least of what Burke means by “beyonding,” and that such an approach accords with Crane's own view of his poetic corpus: “I suppose I ought to be thankful to ‘The Red Badge,’ but I am much fonder of my little book of poems, ‘The Black Riders.’ The reason, perhaps, is that it was a more ambitious effort. My aim was to comprehend in it the thoughts I have had about life in general, while ‘The Red Badge’ is a mere episode in life, an amplification” (Letters, p. 79).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Color of the SkyA Study of Stephen Crane, pp. 269 - 321Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989