[Gregory Dowling]

I, too, am a fan of "The Comedian as Letter C", to the extent that I even wrote a long-ish essay on it. I'll just quote one brief passage from that essay, since it fits in well with what William has said above about Browning and Stevens (I like the idea of Stevens meeting Browning's ghost):

In the next section the contrast between the puny figure of Crispin - "A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass" - and the mighty powers of the storm is made even more manifest. The poet uses the language of bombastic excess to brilliant effect, sending up Crispin, who is baffled by the vast, uncontrolled music of the ocean, with its "Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, / Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust". Bloom has pointed to echoes of Whitman's "husky-voiced" sea, which "Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death…" But the language of Stevens's sea is far more polysyllabic and, while overwhelming, is perhaps in the end less portentous. If anything, Stevens may perhaps be parodying some of the more inflated moments in Whitman, while he is also using to superb effect Whitman's love of combining erudite terms with the plainest of homely diction:

imperative haw / Of hum

and:

What word split up in clickering syllables
And storming under multitudinous tones
Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?

Another possible influence in this sea-section is this remarkable passage from Browning's Aristophanes' Apology:

What if thy watery plural vastitude,
Rolling unanimous advance, had rushed,
Might upon might, a moment, - stood, one stare,
Sea-face to city-face, thy glaucous wave
Glassing that marbled last magnificence, -
Till fate's pale tremulous foam-flower tipped the grey,
And when wave broke and overswarmed and, sucked
To bounds back, multitudinously ceased,
Let land again breathe unconfused with sea,
Attiké was, Athenai was not now!

In this late poem Browning is both mourning the loss of Athens and celebrating the power of language to preserve it. Just so Balaustion, the heroine of the poem, manages to preserve the dramas of Athens in her memory: and, significantly, the poem pays equal tribute to the tragedies of Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes.

Similarly Crispin shows a kind of comic resilience, which is both mocked and celebrated. As Rajeev S. Patke points out, Crispin's name recalls both the comic barber and valet of 17th-century French drama and the Christian martyr invoked as protector by Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt. He is both comic butt and emblematic hero, both petty-bourgeois buffoon and artistic adventurer. Throughout the poem we see him undergoing continual trials, resulting in "several ritual deaths" from which, as Ronald Wallace says, he is resurrected each time. At the end of his maritime experience, we are told that "Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new"