Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-l82ql Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-28T12:19:02.780Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - The Farther Shore: Poems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

David Halliburton
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Get access

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 Sky
A Study of Stephen Crane
, pp. 269 - 321
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×