White Buildings

1st edition
(publ. Boni and Liveright)

The first collection (1926) of poetry by Hart Crane, an American modernist poet critical to both lyrical and language poetic traditions.

Featuring 'For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,' Crane's much-loved love poem, the 'Voyages' series, and some of his most famous lyrics--'My Grandmother's Love Letters' and 'Chaplinesque'--, Harold Bloom argues that this collection alone, if perhaps taken with his later lyric, 'The Broken Tower,' could have secured Crane's reputation.^[1]

Reception

Eugene O'Neill was happy to help Crane by writing a preface to White Buildings, but, increasingly frustrated with his failure to articulate an understanding of the poems, left it to Allen Tate to finish.^[2] Reviewing the collection from the other side of the press, Edmund Wilson fared little better, crediting Crane with a ‘remarkable style... almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style... not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all.’ ^[3] (Crane responded to these critical failures by calling Wilson’s article ‘half-baked,’ and declared that O’Neill had never had ‘the necessary nerve to write what his honesty demanded—a thoroughly and accurate appraisal of my work’.^[4]

Notes

1. ^ See Bloom's 'Introduction' to The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (2000) ed. Mark Simon
2. ^ p. 227, Mariani, Paul. The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane. (1999)
3. ^ p. 200, Wilson, Edmund. The Shores of Light. (1952)
4. ^ Hammer, Langdon, ed. O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. (1997); pp. 336; 478