ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications of connections broached by Harold Bloom when he argues that, like a new Byron or Shelley, Crane was a Pilgrim of the Absolute, a Shelleyan myth-maker hymning an Alien God. Hart Crane sensed what in a letter he called an absolute music in the air again, and some tremendous rondure floating somewhere. Crane is at once post-Romantic and modernist as he suggests that the tremendous rondure is a way of talking about the created poem. Crane's opening gives the time of the willows' an absolute status, as though refuting the Romantic insistence of the value-endowing properties of the imagination. Transmemberment of song might also name an idealising wish in relation to poetic tradition, one that would allow the poetry of the past to speak to and through the poetry of the present. But Crane is the reverse of either bumptious or subordinate in his relation to the Romantic tradition.
