O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane

Crane (1899-1932) left one major book of poetry, The Bridge (1930). This new collection of his letters, drawn by Yale English professor Hammer from Weber's 1952 edition and including correspondence unavailable then, details the poet's sloppy personal life and--from 1923 until publication--the development of The Bridge. Crane hoped it would be called the best long poem by an American since Whitman, yet even his cronies dismissed it. But it outlasted the criticism as well as the verse of its reviewers. Crane's agitated responses to his disloyal friends are among the most interesting of the letters, which are otherwise a litany of troubled relationships, gay encounters, alcoholic dissipation, chronic indebtedness, failure to hold jobs and rancorous as well as pleading appeals to his divorced parents. Many of Crane's poetic instincts appear shrewd, from his attraction to Blake and to the neglected Melville, to his admiration for such apostles of modernity as Eliot, Joyce and Yeats, in whose company he aspires to be. Although the annotations increase with the years, there are too few of them here even for the most literarily sophisticated. Illustrations not seen by PW. (July)