"And yet this great wink of eternity..."

A lovely, jargon-free review by Adam Kirsch of the newly published Library of America edition of Hart Crane's collected poetry and letters. Perhaps no other modernist poet confounds notions of literalness; perhaps no other poet of that great epoch between 1915 and 1950 demanded so much from his readers (he makes T.S. Eliot look like Robert Frost, and Robert Frost look like Robert Frost), as evinced by the one time I taught him in a freshman lit class and was rewarded by a wave of anthologies hurled at my podium. He was one of the rare poets whose alcoholism abetted his principles; the half-lucid daze with which the sensitive spirit confront a vision of beauty required verse that risked incoherence in its attempt to limn moods and shades which remain at the edge of cognition anyway:

Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,
Still flickering with those prefigurations...
There is some way, I think, to touch
Those hands of yours that count the nights
Stippled with pink and green advertisements.