Afterword

Stephen Crane and "The Black Riders and other lines" To genius must always go two gifts, the thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a miracle. . . . But to make it available, it needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to men. (R. W. Emerson, “Intellect”)

I There are four books published in the nineteenth century that define the shape of American poetry. First is Poe’s 1845 volume The Raven and Other Poems, then Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), then the posthumous Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890), and finally Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders and other lines, published in 1895. The significance of the first three is well known and has been extensively discussed. Not so Crane’s book. Its importance is less recognized partly because he is, with good reason, celebrated as a prose writer and not as a poet. But there is another, equally good and equally important, reason. Unlike the other three volumes, Crane’s book is notable less as a collection of poetical works than as a book whose graphic design was created as “an echo to the sense” of Crane’s texts. Something like that might also be said—has been said—of Whitman’s and Dickinson’s volumes. We know that Whitman was much concerned with the design of his book, and Dickinson’s first volume would become notorious for the ways its editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson, reshaped Dickinson’s strange and wonderful manuscript texts for their appearance in print. But the case of Crane’s book is quite different. The Black Riders and other lines is the first American book printed with a clear Modernist design. Its publisher was the adventurous new Boston firm Copeland and Day, consciously founded in 1893 as an American exponent for the innovative ventures in graphic and typographic design begun in England in the mid-1880s (see Frankel, Hammond, McGann, Nelson, and Stetz). Herbert Copeland and Fred Day moved in a circle of young Americans, men and women, who were enthusiasts of the revolution in art and literature that began in the 1850s with the Rossetti circle and the founding of The Germ and Morris’s Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and climaxed in the 1890s of Wilde and Beardsley, Ricketts and Shannon, The Hobby Horse, The Dial, and The Yellow Book. The firm began its operations sometime in 1893, largely through the efforts of its leading sponsor Fred Day, who had begun to cultivate important connections with the London literary and publishing world: with William Heinemann, J. W. Dent, and particularly with John Lane and Charles Elkin Mathews, the publishers of The Bodley Head. Copeland and Day signaled their allegiances with an elegant bookplate designed by Charles Ricketts and the announcement of their first set of publications. These included a portfolio of Walter Crane designs illustrating The Tempest, the American printing of The Hobby Horse and of Wilde and Beardsley’s Salome, an Aesthetic manifesto by Ralph Adams Cram titled The Decadent: Being the Gospel of Inaction, and a Kelmscott-inspired edition of Rossetti’s House of Life. These works began appearing early in 1894. So far as Crane’s book is concerned, the decisive event came sometime in mid-1894 when Copeland and Day agreed to be the American distributor of Wilde’s new work, The Sphinx, designed by Charles Ricketts. Commenting on the arresting typographical design of the book, Ricketts observed that the “unusual length of the lines” of Wilde’s verse led him “away from the Renaissance towards a book marked by surviving classical traits, printing it in Capitals” (Ricketts 25), with a consequent allusion to Greek and Roman majascule lettering. In fact, the book’s principal text was printed in small caps with the stanza headings in large cap roman numbers. The Black Riders volume has the same typographical design. Moreover, Copeland and Day’s rationale for choosing that design follows Ricketts so closely that there must have been direct communication between the English and Americans about these two books. Shortly after Copeland and Day began distributing The Sphinx, they were approached by John Barry, editor of the Forum magazine, about publishing a set of unusual prose poems by the young and relatively unknown writer Stephen Crane. Hamlin Garland showed Barry a sheaf of some thirty of Crane’s poems in early April 1894, and Barry was so impressed that he read some at the Uncut Leaves Society meeting of 14 April, and soon afterwards “fired them off to Copeland and Day (Garland, 195). The publishers agreed to take Crane’s work sometime during the next two or three months—the exact date is uncertain, but Crane wrote to them in the summer, perhaps August, asking whether the publication would be “all under way by early fall”: “I have not heard from you in some time [and] am in the dark in regard to your intentions” (Correspondence I. 72). At that point discussions began in earnest. During September and October 1894, Crane and his publishers argued about whether some of the poems should be omitted as too incendiary. Protesting that the publishers’ proposed cuts would remove “all the ethical sense out of the book,” Crane argued that “It is the anarchy which I insist on” (letter of 9 September). As author and publisher wrangled about the precise contents of the book, other publication decisions were being made. The received title was Crane’s suggestion, reflecting as it does Crane’s view that these works should not be called “poems” but “lines or pills” (Correspondence I. 171 ). For their part, Copeland and Day wanted illustrations for the book, so on 19 October they sent Crane—along with a list of seven works they wanted removed—“a couple of drawings either of which might please you to be used by way of frontispiece for the book; one would be something illustrative, while the other would be symbolic in a wide sense” (Correspondence I. 76). Crane and his publishers came to an agreement about the book’s contents shortly after this letter from Copeland and Day. A portion of the correspondence is clearly missing, however, for the next letter we have is from Crane to the publisher (30 October) enclosing “copy of the title poem.” Copeland and Day’s response (31 October) shows that Crane must have written to the publishers about the drawings they sent on 19 October: “as yet the drawings have not come to hand: neither new ones nor those we forwarded you. Kindly advise us whether others are being made up.” Crane moved in a circle of artists and book illustrators in New York and he apparently suggested to his publishers that one of them might illustrate the book—an event Crane tried to effect during the next several months. Crane’s friend Frederick Gordon was engaged in January to submit drawings for the covers and title page. After inquiring about the drawings, Copeland and Day turned to the issue of the book’s general design. The form in which we intend to print The Black Riders is more severely classic than any book yet issued in America, and owing to the scarcity of types it will be quite impossible to set up more than a dozen pages at a time. Of course you wish to see proof for correction, but we would ask whether you wish the punctuation of copy followed implicitly or the recognized authorities on pointing of America or England? The passage clearly shows that Copeland and Day were thinking of a design that keyed off the design Ricketts created for The Sphinx. The decision to print the entire text in small caps made it “impossible to set up more than a dozen pages at a time.” Each of the book’s “lines” would be set high in the page and headed with a Roman numeral in large caps. The English influence is particularly clear in the query about whether Crane wanted to follow American or English punctuation conventions. The publishers held off typesetting until they had a reply from Crane. After some delay he wrote (10 December) an important and revealing response: I have grown somewhat frightened at the idea of old English type since some of my recent encounters with it have made me think I was working out a puzzle. Please reassure me on the point. . . . (letter of 10 December) Crane was clearly misinterpreting Copeland and Day’s remark about a “more severely classic” design. He thought they were referring to the highly ornamental style (“old English type”) that he would have known, for instance, from their own recent Kelmscott-influenced edition of Rossetti. But that gothic approach to design was precisely what Copeland and Day were veering away from, and why they saw the book as unlike “any book yet issued in America.” Evidently Copeland and Day succeeded in reassuring Crane, for on 16 December he wrote back that “The type, the page, the classic form of the sample suits me,” and he gave the publishers leave to choose the style of punctuation. Typesetting began in December and continued for some months, with surviving proofs showing trial variations on their “classic” approach. They also began working with Crane’s friend, the book artist Frederick Gordon, on drawings for the covers, a title page, and a possible frontispiece. In late January or early February, Gordon submitted a stunning design for spine and covers with an orchid motif, adding in his letter that “The orchid, with its strange habits, extraordinary forms and curious properties, seemed to me the most appropriate floral motive, an idea in which Mr. Crane concurred before he left New York. . . . Will you kindly let me know whether it suits your requirements?” (Correspondence I. 89n. The publishers wrote back that they wanted the design modified, but Gordon’s schedule prevented him from undertaking the revisions, so the task fell to an artist chosen by Copeland and Day. Typesetting and proofing of the text carried on into late January and perhaps beyond, as did proofing of the art work and the printing of the publication announcements. An edition of five hundred copies was ordered (price $1) with fifty extra specially bound copies on Japan paper and printed in green ink. The book was announced in Publishers’ Weekly on 11 May 1895. Sometime in 1896 a second edition was issued—called the “THIRD EDITION” on the verso of its title page—with a title page imprint “BOSTON COPELAND AND DAY MDCCCXCVI | LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN.” Actually the second edition, it was perhaps so identified because of the fifty copies printed on Japan paper. On 14 November, Heinemann released their own edition (price 3 shillings) from sheets printed in the United States but with their own title page and half title.

II When Crane was writing his poems and showing them to friends and acquaintances, the responses were as split as they would be when the book was released to the reviewers. “There was clash and clang of spear and shield” of admirers and detractors, an understandable result given the deliberately arresting character of the texts, on the one hand, and of their graphical presentation on the other. Indeed, Copeland and Day’s design represents the first public act of interpretation that Crane’s “lines” received. The design’s chief move was to give an abstract inflection to the texts, as if they were not to be read as the works of a poet but as a set of quasi-absolute, prophetic inscriptions. The signature lines that open the book are entirely characteristic: black riders came from the sea. there was clash and clang of spear and shield, and clash and clang of hoof and heel, wild shouts and the wave of hair in the rush upon the wind: thus the ride of sin. By calling attention to itself as a textual presence (rather than a vehicle of linguistic reference), the typography turns the lines back into themselves, leading one to identify the “black riders” with their immediate typographical unfolding. This move simultaneously evacuates the texts of the subjectivity that poetry, particularly romantic poetry, commonly asks the reader to expect. The effect is particularly forceful because this initial text avoids an explicit first-person grammar. When such a grammar is finally invoked—in numbers III and IV—we observe the subjective poet begin to disappear into his forms of expression. This process is first signaled in number II, when we meet a line of “three little birds in a row.” These are plainly figured as symbolic of poetic expression—they “sat musing” —and they come here to laugh at a third-person poet who “thinks he can sing.” In this case, the text brings an ironic self-reference to the presumed poet of this book we are reading. Why the birds laugh at the poet is left unexplained. But the point is not to evoke a confounding mystery, it is to construct a sign to index Crane’s emerging argument for a new conception of “the poet,” who is being visibly dissociated here from the conventional signs of voice and song. The argument is moved along in numbers III and IV, where a first person is introduced: “in the desert/ i saw a creature, naked bestial” (III). Because the scene is allegorically generalized, this first person turns to a kind of Everyman, an effect reinforced by the balladic form of the lines, which present a little dramatic encounter between the “I” and the “creature.” From this point the first-person grammar will be dislocated from its usual association with the first person of the quotidian author. The “I” enters a kind of cosmic space where it encounters various transhuman beings, powers, and dominions: i stood upon a high place, and saw, below, many devils (IX) a learned man came to me once. he said, “i know the way,—come.” (XX) once i saw mountains angry, and ranged in battle front. (XXII) i walked in a desert. and i cried, "ah, god, take me from this place!" a voice said, " it is no desert." i cried, "well, but — the sand, the heat, the vacant horizon." a voice said, "it is no desert." (XLII) The last selection—number XLII—illustrates another of the book’s special poetic effects. The marriage of Crane’s hieratic prose-poetic style with its bibliographical presentation produces some crucial symbolic relations. The “desert” of number III recurs through the sequence both literally and in various waste-place transformations. This “desert” emerges as a figure for the territory of all the lines in the book—and ultimately gets indexed by the paper on which the printed lines of black riders make their appearances. XLII suggests that Crane’s bleak landscapes actually reveal the presence of a living world hidden from ordinary view. In The Black Riders we are to discover a new order of visible darkness. i was in the darkness; i could not see my words nor the wishes of my heart. then suddenly there was a great light – "let me into the darkness again." A particularly interesting transformation of the “desert” motif comes in number LXV: once, i knew a fine song, – it is true, believe me,– it was all of birds, and i held them in a basket; when i opened the wicket, heavens! they all flew away. i cried, "come back, little thoughts!" but they only laughed. they flew on until they were as sand thrown between me and the sky. In number II these song birds mocked the man who thought he could sing. Here the difference between the poet as lector and poet as scriptor shifts to a new revelation. The escaping birds undergo a double transformation: from grains of desert sand that obscure the air they mutate, at a second order of symbolic form, to suggest a night sky scattered with stars. In an important sense, the whole of Crane’s book is addressing the problem of poetic expression as it is passing into the age of mechanical reproduction. Number IV exhibits the problem in a splendid little gnomic expression: yes, i have a thousand tongues, and nine and ninety-nine lie. though i strive to use the one, it will make no melody at my will, but is dead in my mouth. The lines are a kind of riddle defining the non-lyrical, non-subjective character of the texts we read in Crane’s book. Like the “I” of number III, the “speaker” of these lines is a kind of impersonality—in this case, not an Everyman but The Poet reflecting on his emergent historical crisis, which is symbolically figured in the typographical representation of the death of the subjective poet (“my will”) and his lyric forms (“my mouth”). Number V completes the book’s introductory sequence of lines. The text pivots around the conflicts raised by “a man” who issues a Zarathustrian command: “range me all men of the world in rows.” A “terrific clamor” follows, echoing “the clash and clang” of number I even as the rows are recalling the lines of black riders ranged for march and struggle, like the mountains of number XXXVIII: on the horizon the peaks assembled; and as i looked, the march of the mountains began. and as they marched, they sang, “aye! we come! we come!” Like Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm,” number V unfolds a symbolic drama about the contradictory forces unleashed in poetic creation. Its import, however, is much closer to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the “Printing House” Blake reveals in Plate 15. The struggle raised by the man’s rage for order in number V is very like the struggle between the forces of Blake’s “Prolific” (“those who would not stand in rows”) and “Devourer” (“those who pined to stand in rows”). Where Blake gives a comic inflection to this struggle, Crane’s view is much darker (“the man went to death, weeping”) —though of course for Crane, “the darkness” is his proper visionary environment, the land of the Black Riders. The connections that function across the field of The Black Riders are often as clear as those that reach back from number V to number I, or as indirect—and less immediate—as the relation of “the desert” in number III to the “burning sand” in number XXI and “the sand” of number LXV. Or consider the relation of the “bloody scuffle” of number V and its “quarrel, world-wide”: it endured for ages; and blood was shed And then observe the bibliographical inflection this is given in number XLVI: many red devils ran from my heart and out upon the page. they were so tiny the pen could mash them. and many struggled in the ink. Crane’s lines are plainly inflected with what Blake called “the Voice of the Devil.” While that voice comes in various tones—mocking and defiant, defeated and bewildered, intimate and sympathetic—all struggle for expression in the ink.

III That basic figural form led Crane to the title he chose for his book. But the figure carried an expressive demand that Crane himself was in no position to meet. Black Riders is a remarkable achievement because the expressive demand implicit in Crane’s writing was only fulfilled when Copeland and Day supplied it with an adequate graphical exponent. The book’s impersonality, so to speak, is fulfilled in an interpretive-graphic design it acquires indirectly, from a non-authorial source. The historical significance of that situation is impossible to overstate. It clearly forecasts the twentieth century’s emphasis on “the reader’s part” in the construction of meaning. Before the coming of the reader, The Poet will think: “i was in the darkness;/ i could not see my words.” From elsewhere comes an illumination, signs of meaning expressed in words now made visible to The Poet. But in Crane’s horizon, these great lights are themselves darkening signs—black riders drawing The Poet back into the prolific darkness. This return brings a visible, literal darkness—the typographical signs emerging in the white desert of the page—where The Poet can now see his words clearly for what they are: a darkness calling to another darkness, writer to reader, creator to re-creator. 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 emergence of 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 graphical design. 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 Aubrey Beardsley 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 knowing how 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 decadent forms. 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 spirit that 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 by Copeland 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 cultivated by 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 poetic formality, 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 work pivots on line 4, which operates simultaneously in the grammar of lines 1-3 and that of lines 5-7. Copeland and Day’s rendering doesn’t set aside the plain text version, it excavates it. The flagrantly “classical” book design brings high artifice to what might otherwise have seemed a careless text. Now those loose rhymes seem the formalities of another language, like the remarkable off rhymes that Rossetti discovered for English verse through his poetical Italienische Reise, The Early Italian Poets. 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. But simply quoting the lines in these small caps doesn’t reveal the interpretive force the general book brings to each of its works. In plain text, number X is a kind of loose epigram; in The Black Riders it turns gnomic, one of sixty-eight similar pieces that are delivered as if they were fragments recovered from a lost scripture. Then there is Melanie Norton’s illustrated text produced for The Bookman in 1896.

View a high-resolution image of this page. Here the text is not so much illustrated as illuminated in a mode that recalls, for example, the design for the prose-poem “Argument” to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where the design penetrates and merges into the text. Note how the idea implicit in the poem—that the white page space is the abstract form of the “white arms” —gets materialized. The white figure appearing through the black ink below the text is not the second person of the poem but the first person, here seen as having fallen into a state of repose. First and second person merge in this figure, born out of the white space waiting “there” and only to be realized through the onset of the visible darkness. That visual double-mindedness brings interpretive clarity to an odd collision of semantic meanings in the text. Is the text stating that the white arms remove the threat of a long fall to doom? Or is it saying that the promise of those white arms makes a long fall to doom something to be desired? While the text offers both meanings to us, Norton’s design explicates the paradox they represent.

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