Sherry Chandler

Talk about word drunk – I cannot read Hart Crane. I just find my rather flighty attention drifting away from his profligacy of words and the puzzle of his meaning. But while once in a while a line may seem perhaps tortured and pathetic:

“Slit the sky’s pancreas of foaming anthracite..”

occasional passages just knock me flat:

Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding
They, cavalcade on escapade, shear Cumulus—
Lay siege and hurdle cirrus down the skies!

or

Lead-perforated fuselage, escutcheoned wings
Lift agonized quittance, tilting from the invisible brink
Now eagle-bright, now
                                              quarry-hid, twist-
                                                                            ings down
Giddily spiraled
                                    gauntlets, upturned, unlooping
In guerilla slights, trapped in combustion, gyr-
Ing, dance the curdled depth
                                                        down whizzing
Zodiacs, dashed
                                    (now nearing fast the Cape!)
                                                              down gravitation’s
                                                                              vortex into crashed
. . . dispersion . . . into mashed and shapeless debris . . .
By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high bravery!

These lines are from the Cape Hatteras section of “The Bridge” in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane (Anchor Books, 1966) that my husband bought for $1.50 at the Student Coop of the University of Chicago in 1975 or thereabouts.