Description:
A critical reassessment of the life's work of a major American poet.
Review Quotes: "In the wake of his flamboyant life and suicide, the figure of Hart Crane has proven a remarkable shape-shifter. Over the decades, the man and his poetry have served all manner of interpretive purpose, from apotheosis to morality tale. Literary criticism of late has fancied him in the guise of what Reed (Univ. of Washington, Seattle) calls ''the' gay white male American modernist poet.' Departing from recent interpretive trends, Reed seeks to redirect critical attention to Crane the author in order to 'illuminate anew his achievements' and, more ambitiously, "to test and perhaps transform the principles and methods that enable those very insights." He divides the book into three parts: the first attempts to 'test the value of the most common rubrics' for understanding Crane's poetics; the second focuses on the process of poetic composition; the third, and most useful, provides detailed chapters on the reception of Crane among three poets affiliated with the New American Poetry: Paul Blackburn, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Kaufman. Regrettably, the turgid prose and academic stubble indicative of a revised dissertation will limit interest in this book to specialists. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty."
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"Reed's scholarship is thorough, his criticism creative, and his writing style limpid."-- Susan M. Schultz, author of A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary Poetry