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Rating:  - A Reading of "Stark Major"
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R9RGG45QBJ0WW I decided on this (relatively) obscure poem, because, rather than Crane's more famous poems (The "Voyages" series, "The Bridge" or "The Broken Tower"), it was unknown to me until I purchased this book. Also, of course, I found it very striking and lovely, though dark.
Rating: - Whispers antiphonal in azure swing...
How can I review Hart Crane? He's been part of my consciousness, my whole sense of the possibilities of language and of the English language especially, since I first read his work in the 1950s. At that time, I read him as the fiercest modernist, the wildest adventurer in abstract verbal emotion, yet now I re-read him and find a lapidary conservator of the poetic tradition, rhyming his fervid images in strict quatrains.
None of the critical assessments and explications of Crane's poetry have ever jibed with my visceral/musical response to his exaltations. Yes, he was a tortured soul, tormented by his homosexuality. Yes, he committed suicide. But the vision in his language is far from bleak. It's all a paean of beauty. What I think happened, when he jumped from the ship into the sea that had always been a symbol of overwhelming infinity, was that he lost his religion, that is, his belief in the salvation offered by poetic transformation:
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wing shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty --
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day...
That's how Crane launches his huge poem The Bridge, with an invocation addressed to the icon of his modernity, the Brooklyn Bridge, and to the city of New York. "Liberty" is of course the statue, and it was the liberty of his choice to write poems for a life that took him to New York. Beyond that hint of my understanding of Crane, let your ears make what you want of it. I suppose Crane is ultimately a musician's poet; like music, his words pulse with feeling that never needs to be forced to be explicit.
Rating: - In the Tradition
Hart Crane's brilliant poetry continues in the tradition of Eliot's 'The Wasteland,' in that he is interested in exploring the modern American landscape. Crane's poetry pulsates with his passion and tragedy. Frequent themes are his own homosexuality and the coldness of contemporary existence. His work is tremendous achievement in terms of its visual beauty and lyrical flow:
"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.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells."
Hart Crane lived a tragically short life. Fortunately his remarkable work remains.
Rating:  - received Veterans cards instead, no product
This is the worst kind of service available from any seller, just really insulting. Never received the poems, just a box of veterans greeting cards, which are worthless and immediately thrwn away
Rating: - Kiss of our agony
I'll try to be brief, for we are on holy ground. Hart Crane is among the greatest English Poets; he extends the orphic tradition--he works under the assumption (fact?) that poetry is nothing less than Life staying Death--and not in the tradition of mere "Culture", of elegant verses for elegant people.
Among his few peers, we have Keats, Stevens, Spenser (of the epithalamium), Blake, Shelley, and Shakespeare--yes, I said it and I meant it...at his best, Crane possesses as much daemonic power as Shakespeare. There are others, without a doubt, but rarely will one enounter so much of the concentrated Sublime, of pure poetry in such a small body of work. Some of his final fragments are more True than most of the Qu'ran, the Bible, etc, etc. Like a saint, Crane sacrificed everything in order to give us the gift of his song, including his own life. If he had lived, he would certainly be better known (as if Fame were enough); he might be esteemed our country's greatest artist. My advice, read "Atlantis" until you have it by heart--your life will never be the same.
In short, this is poetry at its highest. A moral force, a religious power, an estatic appraisal of our collective destruction, a hymn to to city, an elegy for birth, a myth for our exiled god, Love, to Whom we must ever strive to know better.
p.s. There is a rumor that the Library of America will (at last!) put out an edition of Crane this Autumn that is likely to be the one to get (my copy of their Stevens is exquisite--it trumped Knopf's Collected Poems, something I never thought possible. So if you want to save your money, you can wait for that & hit the library in the meantime (assuming that your public library is unlike mine, and has something other than than how-to books and unauthorized biographies of Jane Fonda).
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