Having been rendered hand-mention-sensitized, as it were, by my concordance of hands in Winesburg, Ohio, I immediately stood upright when John Unterecker, in his biography of Hart Crane, called attention to Crane’s early poem “Episode of Hands.”
This poem could easily describe a situation in Winesburg, (a worker bandages another worker’s injured hand, which is a point of personal connection between them), and the plot thickens a bit because Crane had certainly read the Winesburg stories and was indeed a correspondent of Anderson’s.
The question consequently arose: Did this poem reveal a conscious or unconscious lifting of the hand motif from Winesburg?
The answer is — probably no. At least, this doesn’t appear to have occurred to Anderson himself, to whom Crane sent the poem, and who was severely critical of it on separate grounds. (This is discussed by Unterecker on pp.167-168 of Voyager.)
I suppose it would have interested me to know that either Crane or Anderson were conscious of those Winesburg hand repetitions, but there is no evidence of anything of that kind here. It would be interesting, nevertheless, to see Anderson’s full response to the poem.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 