The Hart Crane Poems

UO THE MINNESOTA REVIEW CHARLES BAXTER THE HART CRANE POEMS He is all that fabulous equipment wrecked as it crosses the border from candyland, dreamy jetsam the ship throws out before sweating into the pink harbor of America. He persists as long as youth lasts and stays desperate to stay useless. As you grow up, he leaves you behind or below, drawing his long beautiful hair out of a window in the Woolworth Building, to check out its immaculate fire. At night he is the cry that exhausts the dictionary, a frenzy picked up from Stokowski's 78's of Sibelius. He sits alone in the usual clapboard closet, hammering the words insensible, and as usual he is dead early. He gathers crowds who yearn to imitate his body's typical grimace and posture. Of course he's a myth: a total commitment to adolescence, revenge poems, the words clattering across the white page like tanks, scattering cryptic debris. And that's why all the poets draw close to the body of the young poet: they want to finish off his poems, they want to keep writing him until he is more and more dead. They want him held safely under the sea. ...