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Overview
Examining how Crane's corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career, The Machine That Sings focuses on four texts in which Crane's preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge. Tapper treats Voyages, The Wine Merchant, and Possessions as a triptych of erotic poems in which Crane plays out alternative resolutions to the dialectic between purity and defilement, a conceptual dynamic which Tapper argues is central to both Crane's poetics of difficulty and his representations of homosexual desire. Tapper concentrates on the three sections of The Bridge, most concerned with recuperating animality: 'National Winter Garden,' 'The Dance,' and 'Cape Hatteras.'
Synopsis
The Machine That Sings examines the relationship between Crane's poetry and the widespread preoccupation with the animality of the body that helped define American modernism during the 1920s. Focusing on "Voyages," "The Wine Menagerie," "Possessions," and The Bridge, Tapper argues that Crane's corporeal poetics are engaged in a dialogue with competing views of the body as, on one hand, a surface inscribed by history and, on the other, a source of renewal enabled by the recuperation of animality.& nbsp; By reading Crane alongside an array of cultural discourses--including sexology; ethnography; the vogue for Native Americans as a symbol of authenticity; the encoded language of an emerging urban gay subculture; disputes over obscenity; and the rhetoric of the technological sublime--Tapper allows us to see how Crane's notoriously difficult poems are embedded in their historical context