The Machine that Sings: Modernism, Hart Crane and the Culture of the Body

The Machine That Singsexamines 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 TheBridge, 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.& 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