Monday, February 26, 2007

Crane's beachhead

Not surprisingly, William Logan's harsh assessment of Hart Crane, in his recent review of the new edition of Crane's Collected Poems, elicited a flurry of angry letters to the Times Book Review this weekend.

Writing of "The Bridge," for instance, Logan had offered this dismissal:

Much of "The Bridge" seems inert now -- overlong, overbearing, overwrought, a Myth of America conceived by Tiffany and executed by Disney.

A trio of letter writers came to Crane's defense in this week's Review. One, Warner Berthoff, professor emeritus of English and American literature at Harvard, wrote:

Whom shall we pay attention to? Robert Lowell, who spoke of Hart Crane as "the great poet" of his American generation and "at the center of things the way no other poet was"? Yvor Winters, who wrote that he "would gladly emulate Odysseus and go down to the shadows for another hour's conversation with Crane on the subject of poetry"? Or William Logan, whose disparagement disfigured your pages in reviewing the Library of America edition of Crane’s poems and letters?

All three letters are worth a read, and though it's likely just a coincidence and nothing more, note that all three Crane defenders are from Greater Boston. If the Brooklyn Bridge crowd can't be entrusted with Crane's legacy, it's the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge folks to the rescue!

Posted by John Swansburg at 11:25 AM

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