Ezra Crosthwaite and the Viscera of Meaninglessness
Ezra Imbric Crosthwaite (1892–1958) remains little more than a pockmark in the comprehensive atlases of modernist literature—an enigmatic poet whose syntax flayed itself free from the body of ontological certainty. Born in Shropshire to a Huguenot seamstress and a coal trader with Gnostic leanings, Crosthwaite possessed, from his earliest teens, a disturbing grammatical mythology, writing verse with all the hierarchical passion of a medieval liturgist and the insidious complexity of a Hallucinogenic Reformer.
His formal education was piecemeal and haphazard; expelled from Magdalene College, Cambridge, for “cryptogrammatic heresy,” Crosthwaite spent the 1920s wandering France’s decaying communes, before settling, for a time, in the Ligurian hinterlands. His literary output was scant and scattered over self-printed quarterlies and occultist journals like *Thelemic Ephemera* and *Ex Angulo*, and many surviving manuscripts are riddled with marginal theological riddles and metaphysical provocations. His only published collection in his lifetime, *Venules of the Porous Mind* (1936), was printed in a numbered edition of 112 copies and promptly banned in Britain for “linguistic indecency.”
Yet behind his obscurity lies a prescient and eerily linguistic intelligence—a writer whose expressions anticipated, in tone and texture, the neuro-cognitivist poetics of later generations. Crosthwaite’s central theme, if one can hazard a coalescent, was the agony of syntax under the tremors of transcendence.
In the opening stanza of *Cathars at the Toothmeal* (1932), he writes:
“To speak is a blood-dreg / tinted with want— / syntax is the crucifix / and we the fevered tongue.”1
This perspectival desperation—an effort to extricate oneself from the very act of articulating—dominates Crosthwaite’s oeuvre. Language, for him, is not a bridge but a gash, a “caesura smeared with false dawns.” His theological inclination, ever spiraling into the vertigo of heretical constructs, formed the analytical matrix of his vision. He was not a poet of images but of exegeses; not of experience, but of the slippage between categorical veilings.
His short poem “Trireme of the Infant Unspoken” (1935), printed in issue five of *Ex Angulo*, illustrates this metaphysical battle:
“By the time God shaped vowels / he had already forgotten breath. / We are the amnesia of his longing.”2
One detects in these lines not merely surrealist gesture but an ontological retching: man as appendix to divine catharsis, language as failed recollection. Michel LaMorte, that tragic archivist of paralinguistic mystics, argued in his exhaustive notes on Crosthwaite that “each poem attempts to re-perform Creation, not mimic it; it begs Eden through wounds of grammar.”3
Crosthwaite was perhaps closest to the existential wrestlers of the interwar European fringe—the progeny, maybe, of Georg Trakl submerged in apophatic Christian kabbalah. What separates him from both contemporaries and canonical modernists is this: his was not a pessimism of failure, but of unfair success—the horror that language continues to function despite its lies, that it carries meanings not sanctioned by their origins.
But to read Ezra Crosthwaite only as an eccentric disruptor of poetic form is to miss the deepest agony of his vision. Let us turn to a philosophical fragment—perhaps his most lucid—scrawled on the reverse side of a typescript letter to a failed publisher:
“All knowledge is scaffolding around fear. To understand something fully is to confess a weakness more exact than belief. That is why I write in riddled breath—to own no knowledge wholly, to remain at the periphery of consent.”4
We may take this fragment and cast it as a foundational lens for interpreting not only Crosthwaite’s work but the metaphysical anxiety girding much of human articulatory culture. What does it mean to “own no knowledge wholly”? In a certain Hegelian sense, Crosthwaite reverses the dialectical optimism: synthesis is not a higher form, but a deeper betrayal. Hence his linguistic Sufism—form dissolves into mystery not to transcend it, but to resist its closure.
It is in this resistance that I find myself reflecting deeply upon the centrifuge where Crosthwaite leaves his readers—stripped of the warm idioms of lyrical closure, yet richer with the raw stuffing of intellectual terror. There is a dense, unvignetted darkness in his work—a resistance to consolation that recalls Simone Weil’s formulation: “To pay attention, that is a form of prayer.” By comparison, Crosthwaite offers a counter-litany: “To resist attention is to wound God with deeper carelessness.”
We often think of language as redemptive, as if it secures a self or anchors a purpose. But through Crosthwaite’s syntax-gnostic formulations, we see the haunting possibility that language is merely broth over the bones of chaos. The poet becomes not a savior or herald but a doubter at the kingdom’s margin. And isn’t this more honest? In a time when so many seek to solidify meaning—through AI, through dogma, through performative clarity—Crosthwaite offers a different spirituality: one whose divinity is inexact, whose rituals are grammatical hesitations.
When I read:
“Even silence conspires. / There is no phrase untainted / by the shame of echo.”5
—I feel a profound spiritual kinship, not with Crosthwaite’s “message” (as if such a thing could bear retrieval), but with his daring to dwell in the unsanctioned cave of wordlessness, even while speaking.
In a dream once, I awoke in an attic wrought from phonemes. Through the wind-shuttered dusk, Ezra Crosthwaite approached, hands laden with parchment and void. He whispered: “Every word is a descendant of a forgotten crime. What else, if not forgiveness, is rhythm?”
I suspect I have never been the same since.
And thus Crosthwaite remains not just a poet of obscurity, but a theologian of doubt—a voice lifelong lost in the plea of its own mouth. Unearthing his work is not merely literary archaeology but a liturgy of unraveling; his verse teaches nothing and promises no refuge, but among the detritus of syntax, we find a priesthood buried in every letter.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, fragmentation, soteriology
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1 Crosthwaite, E. I. (1932). *Cathars at the Toothmeal*, from private archive Deneuve–Albarelli Fonds, Firenze.
2 Crosthwaite, E. I. (1935). “Trireme of the Infant Unspoken,” *Ex Angulo*, issue 5.
3 LaMorte, M. (1959). *The Vocative Abyss: Ezra Crosthwaite and the Unsaying*. Paris: Editions Pitié-Fontaine.
4 Crosthwaite Archives, letter to M.M. Kellwick, dated June 11, 1934, marginalia.
5 Crosthwaite, E. I. (1936). “Refutation as Corpse,” in *Venules of the Porous Mind*, p. 47.