Here’s an excerpt:
I’m not sure what inspired me to read The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. Perhaps it was just a simple craving for art that utilizes the full resources of language. While some people may find Crane’s poetry unnecessarily inscrutable; his poems are, on the contrary, invocations full of sensuous sonorities, thrusting the reader along eddies of personal associations, the emotional intensity of which I found invigorating; and while reading I was often swept away by the rhythms, the evocations, the lapidary style, and was unconcerned with immediately understanding (this would come, I knew, with repeated readings) the so-called meaning of the poems. Besides the baroque quality of these iambic pentameter lines (set into quatrains for White Buildings and Key West, Crane’s latter two books), there are Crane’s inspired creation of portmanteaus and compounds and hyphenated compounds: “oilrinsed”, “windwrestlers”, “moonferrets”, “cloud-templed”, “star-glistered”, “larval-silver”, “space-gnawing”, “wind-sleuths”, “moonferrets”, “cloud-belfries”, “lead-perforated”, “wing-pulse”, “ghoul-mound” “blue-writ”, “oak-vizored”, “death-strife”, “pasture-shine”, “sky-barracks”, ‘crystal-flooded”, “planet-sequined”, “Everpresence”, “cold-hushed”, “sun-silt”, “Vine-stanchioned”, “chimney-sooted”, “much-exacting”, “Half-riant”, and “transmemberment”.
Check out the rest HERE.
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 