Road to Destruction Paved With Fine Words

With its sonorous language and jumped-up rhythms, the poetry of Hart Crane (1899-1932) is like Bruckner scored for jazz quartet. Its content is similarly syncretic: high-low, old style-new style. You need to bring a lot to his work — alertness, empathy, patience — to get something out of it. But what you get is the grandest American Romantic voice since Walt Whitman . / Holland Cotter, NYT *) 11.6.02
Leseprobe:

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings 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