Customer Reviews:
 The Still Imploring Flame April 6, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Hart Crane is the paragon of great American orphic poetry - yes, such a thing did (does?) exist. At a time when American poets were taking the turn inward to represent human consciousness through their style in a way that was immediately familiar to itself, Hart Crane stood on the perimeter of that boundary; unwilling to traverse it, or stand outside of it. It is such that a wholistic mysticism pervades each poem in its irreducibility to the subject or the bystander. Each is, in its own way, immediately personal and declarative. Like Whitman - though I whince at the comparison - the poem proceeds as a profound declaration whose import can only be marked on the fringes of itself as a whole.
The bottom of the sea is cruel May 27, 2004
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
In his poem "Voyages", from White Buildings, Hart Crane's poetry can be seen in a microcosm: seascapes, youth, time, incredible imagery and language in free verse form; and Love, both personal & cosmic. Crane is huge. He is also an acquired taste, and can be quite demanding to decipher. I've found myself having to re-read his poems multiple times, from different perspectives before grasping their sense. And even then, the "meaning" can be illusive. But this complete collection of his work by Marc Simon includes an insightful introduction by John Unterecker which helps put Crane's life and work into perspective. The singular fault with this book is that Simon's end-notes don't offer any insight into the poems themselves, and so the reader is left to fend for himself. On the one hand this is good in that it encourages self-reflection, and arriving at one's own interpretations. Many of his poems can and should be taken at face value. On the other hand, with Crane, sometimes there is more than meets the eye (i.e. In "Chaplinesque" one should know the Chaplin film, "The Kid" to fully understand the kitten image, and there are many allusions in "The Bridge" and other poems which a reader ought to familiarize himself with at some point) and so, having some literary criticism or background available is very helpful. I highly recommend Warner Berthoff's, "Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction" (University of Minnesota, 1989).Reading Hart Crane is rewarding, and enjoyable. It's a voyage in itself, full of twists and turns, sounds, objects, colors, senses, places, times, language, and history. "The Bridge" is his acclaimed epic, about the Brooklyn Bridge and America, and a must read for those interested in American poetry. Crane was definitely influenced by the revolutionary 19th century French poets Rimbaud and Laforgue, who like Crane, also led tragically short lives. Their lives and works, along with Walt Whitman (of, course) created ample material for modern American poetry, and Hart Crane is their magnificent heir (especially of Jules Laforgue's lyricism and colloquialisms). If you've never tried Crane before, than this is "the" collection to have. Allow Crane to show you his visions of the world from the inside out, take you on journeys across the ocean, and into the modern city and you'll be amazed at how daily life no longer seems so mundane.
 My Favorite Poet April 21, 2004
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
Crane may very well be poetry's last great romantic. Though certainly influenced by Eliot's advances in form, he rejected that poet's despair in favor of a grander, more mythic, and ultimately more affirmative vision of the world. (Ironic then, that he would die young by his own hand, while Eliot lived to be much older...). Crane's poetry is dense, soaked in language, shot through with a burning eroticism, and goverened by what he called "the logic of metaphor." Often enigmatic, labyrinthian or just plain opaque, his poetry is well worth the effort one may need to put in to appreciate it fully. And as with any great work of art, one can discover something new with every repeated reading. This is not a book that sits on your shelf collecting dust.
Intense. October 24, 2001
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Crane is an intensely exciting poet, though his verbal barrage might well be too much for some temperaments. Nevertheless, his poetry, though difficult, rewards serious reading.
A martyr in art March 25, 2001
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Beautifully written, Crane's poetic compositions, with their choice diction, dense and imaginative allegories and technical virtuosity, fall easily into the category of the poetry of "sensation", that is say, poetry characterised chiefly by the registering of impressions. It must be acknowledged that Crane's gifts were best suited to the lyric form. His accomplished style, rhetorical, incantatory, inventive and rhapsodic, steeped in Symbolism and Romanticism, places him above the entire gallery of American Modernist poets. The poetry of Crane, Whitman's proper heir, while pregnant with symbol and allusion, and broad in intellectual reference, does not grow to become forced, pedantic and overlearned as that of Pound. His protests, his struggles, his torments are no less significant than those of Jeffers, though Crane could at least avoid the latter's preaching and occasional pomposity. Above all, he was the poet of "sensation" par excellence, endowed with a capacity for disclosing the furthest and deepest reaches of emotion and feeling, by virtue of his high poetic gifts. Prodigiously talented and doom-laden, Crane, in spiritual kinship with Rimbaud and Shelley, lived as though he were tyrannised, without respite, by Furies he could not conciliate, developing into a compulsive and violent drunk, battling his homosexual urgings, braving the tide of public opinion, which regarded him as a social outcast, and finally plunging to his death in the ocean (which serves in so many of his poems as a symbol of death) at the age of thirty-two. Few martyrs in art have suffered more painfully. Few have endured more grievous torments. All the more are we compelled to admire Crane's stoicism. "Impavidum ferient ruinae".
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