Baron Wormser: The Harrowing of Hart Crane (Among Others)
The fate of eloquence in modern times is played out in Crane’s poetry, not in some ultimate fashion but, rather, as a perpetual vision-quest one man puts himself through, a quest in which poetry is, at once, the means and the end.
Hart Crane: The Air Plant
The lizard’s throat, held bloated for a fly,
Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch.
Hart Crane: Chaplinesque
For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.
Hart Crane: At Melville’s Tomb
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
Philip Levine: On The Meeting Of Garcia Lorca And Hart Crane
…let’s not
invent a dialogue of such eloquence
that even the ants in your own
house won’t forget it.
