The poet of a thousand (lying) voices

On Monday morning I'll be tempted to lead my Representative American Writers class in a rousing chorus of the hymn by Charles Wesley that has appeared at the beginning of the Methodist hymnal since the founding of Methodism:

O, for a thousand tongues to sing
My great redeemer's praise!
The glories of my God and King,
The triumph of His grace!

It's true that Wesley spent a few months in St. Simon's Island, Georgia, in 1736, but that hardly justifies importing his hymn into a Representative American Writers class--unless one of those writers was the son of a renowned Methodist minister and grew up in an environment steeped in pious Methodism. Early in his collection "The Black Riders and Other Lines," Stephen Crane offers this brief stanza:

Yes, I have a thousand tongues,
And nine and ninety-nine lie.
Though I strive to use the one,
It will make no melody at my will,
But is dead in my mouth.

Here we see the young poet thumbing his nose at Charles Wesley along with, perhaps, his parents, their church, and their god. Or perhaps not. In "The Black Riders" Crane is a poet of a thousand voices, but if 999 of them lie and the thousandth one is dead in his mouth, where should the reader seek the poet's true voice?

I've read a few of Crane's poems to students over the years but I've never before attempted to pay any sustained attention to them in class. In Monday morning's class we will try to sift through the many voices in Crane's poetry, but I warned my students in advance that these aren't the sorts of poems they'd want to read to the family over Thanksgiving dinner. Some of the poems resemble Zen koans in their pithiness:

A man feared he might find an assassin;
Another that he might find a victim.
One was more wise than the other.

The sound you now hear is that of one hand, clapping.

Many of Crane's poems feature antagonists circling one another, tossing out taunts and throwing down gauntlets but never coming to any resolution, as in this little snippet from "War Is Kind":

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
"A sense of obligation."

The most interesting thing I've learned about Crane's poetry is that he insisted on calling his poems "Lines" and printing them in all caps so they resembled the stacked headlines commonly used in newspapers in the 1890s. Here, such treatment would suggest that a man's search for meaning is front-page news--unlike in my local paper, which today offers a front-page headline touting the challenges and rewards of shopping on Black Friday. In his fiction, Stephen Crane employed the conventions of popular journalism and genre fiction to sell stories to a reading public for whom his stories conveyed a thinly veiled contempt, but he knew his poems would never sell. Why, then, format them like popular newspaper headlines?

Perhaps because the human search for meaning was always news to Crane, the biggest news of all. In his poems, Crane's men (always men, never women) cry out to big-G God, little-g gods, the universe, and various sages without ever finding definitive answers to their questions. The many-voiced poet suggests that men who believe in God are fools and men who deny God are fools and gods who believe in men are the biggest fools of all. In one poem, God meticulously crafts the universe to exacting specifications but then, in a moment of inattention, it slips out of his grasp and straight into trouble.

Crane's tiny stanzas are so pithy and self-contained that it is tempting to grasp at one or another and assume it represents the poet's big-v Voice, but the poet keeps slipping out of our grasp with every turn of the page. "The Black Riders and Other Lines" thumbs its nose so persistently at all kinds of beliefs that eventually it sounds as if the poet doth protest too much, but then the collection ends on a peculiar note. In the final poem, a spirit speeds through the entire universe calling out for God and finding only silence, until

Eventually, then, he screamed,
Mad in denial,
"Ah, there is no God!"
A swift hand,
A sword from the sky,
Smote him,
And he was dead.

If the poet has at his disposal 999 lying voices and one dead tongue, which voice is that? The sound you now hear is one poet, lying. Or not.