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to undermine any attempt at authentic utterance, it was a glorious experience to ride the surge of the opening lines of Crase’s title poem, and then to realize that the emotional uplift afforded by the poem’s rhythmic energies was the result of no trick or gimmick, but of what Emerson called a “metre-making argument.” Emerson famously rubbed his eyes a little, “to see if this sunbeam were no illusion,” while first perusing the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, dispatched to him with the compliments of the author; and The Revisionist excited similar exclamations of wonder from poets and critics across the spectrum when it first appeared. Here are a few extracts from the “chorus of smiles” that greeted it: “Crase has every prospect of becoming one of the strong poets of his own generation” (Harold Bloom); “The Revisionist seems to me an extraordinarily fine book of poems, only the more extraordinary for being a first book . . . Mr. Crase is already brilliantly the master of several distinct and identifiable idioms, all of which he uses to dramatic or comic or even shocking effect” (Anthony Hecht); “This is the most powerful first book I have seen in a long time. The thematic title poem is magnificent, proclaiming the originality which only revision can provide, finding at a late time in parts of a twilit city the highest tales of our whole country” (John Hollander); “The most interesting book of first poems in many years” (Richard Howard); “A marvelous new poet—deeply and absorbingly ‘American,’ unfazed by the complex sentence of our past, and already parsing a future he will help us to live” (James Merrill); “For sheer ambition, ingenuity and wit, Crase stands alone” (Jay Parini); “That Crase’s invocation of the Whitmanian poetic tradition can be so powerful after all these years of overuse and abuse is a small miracle of revisionism itself ” (Phoebe Pettingell); “This is a staggeringly am-
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bitious book, and its author sets about his task manfully, with no bashfulness or false modesty” (Richard Tillinghast). It was no doubt a comment by Ashbery himself, used as jacket copy, that pushed me to spring for The Revisionist all those decades ago: “Crase looks at the city and the landscape with the amused, disabused eye of a lover. Revisionism, in his supple argumentative poetry, turns out to be something very close to love.” Crase’s title poem begins with an “If ”—and it must be acknowledged it’s an awfully big one:
If I could raise rivers, I’d raise them Across the mantle of your past: old headwaters Stolen, oxbows high and dry while new ones form, A sediment of history rearranged.
Nevertheless, despite the hypothetical manner in which it is framed, the task the poem here sets itself is—imaginatively at least—a Herculean one, for its goal is a recasting of the idea of America that will change both understanding of the country’s historical record and the prevailing sense of possibilities available to the contemporary “American Scholar,” to borrow another concept from Emerson. The suppleness, to use Ashbery’s term, of the argument depends not so much on developing a logical sequence of cause and effect, as in dramatizing, in an original and highly charged idiom, the ongoing processes of engagement and participation, the ebb and flow of belonging inherent in the idea of democracy—or at least in Whitman’s figurations of democracy. At the same time Crase is ever-conscious that it takes all sorts to make up a demos, and that poetry can no more escape the uses of lan-
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