The fervid covenant: Mysticism and the poetics of Hart Crane's 'White Buildings'

This study analyzes Hart Crane's White Buildings as a collection whose dominant motif is mystical quest for divine union. Criticism has acknowledged religious undertones in White Buildings, but the aim of this thesis is to trace specifically the mystical contours of the collection as it moves from imagistic impressions of the nature of perception in early poems such as "Legend" to a visionary narrative of the poet's desire for divine communion in poems such as "Lachrymae Christi" and "Voyages.";The intent of this thesis is not to argue for an explicit or schematic reading of White Buildings as Christian in intent or effect. Instead, it suggests that the metaphors of the dark night and its stress on inner vision and radical transformation of the perceived world are fundamental to a full appreciation of Crane's poetics in White Buildings. This interpretation should yield a more holistic reading of the entire collection and help illuminate how Crane's work in White Buildings achieves a unique status: highly self-conscious religious poetry in a modernist literary context. Hopefully this will bring to the fore of Crane criticism his most moving theme: the poet as a mediator between the dimensional and the spiritual world.;The patterns of Christian mysticism as articulated by the Spanish mystical writers St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila provide the framework for my reading of the poems in White Buildings. Crane's poetic journey in White Buildings has strong and surprising affinities with the Spanish mystical concept of the dark night and its three stages: the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways. This pattern underlies the metaphoric and thematic structure of White Buildings. The chapters of my study analyze these metaphoric, symbolic, and syntactical patterns in important poems, while the final chapter charts their culmination in "Voyages," which is the climax of Crane's mystical vision.