260721: Spann'd by network
Stephanie Wakefield tells us of her great-granddad: A.J. Dunlap, ex-cowboy, soaring across Nebraskan skies, composing poetry—skywriting—broadcasting out, over music, on the radio—reporting back from otherworldly flight, a new and expanded perspective—the Plainsman Poet, they called him, for his lyrical praisings of skyscrapers, and rail, and the Promethean impulse in man.
This is the American contribution to Romantic poetry, and thus to the broader Anglophone Romantic consciousnessness (which, as Charles Taylor and others have noted, gives rise to our modern Age of Authenticity, our culture of "expressive individualism"). Comparing Whitman to Wordsworth, or Crane to (the honorary Englishman) Eliot, one gets a stark sense of their disagreement. "Passage to India" sees Walt celebrating the connective power of the telegraph, railroad, and steamship. Emerson likewise praises how a boiler gives us the fabled power of Aeolus's bag. And Crane picks this up with his ecstatic celebration of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Kingdom is ahead of us, we are building it.
Meanwhile, the English Romantics seem quite distraught over the effects of modernization. I am reminded of Tolkien's "modernity as Mordor" metaphor. The Kingdom of God, a lost English countryside, is vanishing behind us, always vanishing into yesteryear's nostalgia...
Along with "Passage to India," I have found Hart Crane's "The Bridge" immensely valuable in understanding the 19th American futurist dreams & techno-romances. They may come out of the transcontinental project of Manifest Destiny, but they are far less interested in colonization or conquest than they are in interconnection. There is already a celebratory de Chardin-esque telos at hand, in these poets' celebration of spanning, networking, and suturing; of wires and bridges and cables. What we decry as the global, Americanized slop of the Homogenocene is a fallen version of their vision.