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“... moving in loose-living, hard-drinking, left-wing bohemian circles and consorting with the likes of Hart Crane, Maxwell Perkins, Katherine Anne Porter, Louise Bogan and Edmund Wilson’. The likes of, eh? Still, this helps introduce a rather interesting section on Tate, John Crowe Ransom and the so-called Southern Agrarians. Tate, who was more or less ...”

“... to resist were not Hecht’s Audenesque tendencies, but the further influence of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, who could not write without overwriting.Born in 1923 in New York City, Hecht had a privileged but disrupted childhood. His father worked at a fake job paid for by his father-in-law. The boy attended private schools, rarely thriving as a ...”

“... way O’Neill drank: once, after a dry period, he went down to the cellar to taste some cider with Hart Crane and Malcolm Cowley, who had dropped around to his house in Connecticut. His wife found him in New York a week later. On another occasion, he took a half-empty bottle of a Prohibition spirit called Tiger Piss – brand names were less misleading in ...”

“... The letters here are not masterpieces in themselves, like those of Virginia Woolf, say, or Hart Crane, but cumulatively they contain a staggering intellectual energy and erudition. In fact, the Davenport-Kenner letters most resemble Pound’s letters, with a similar telegraphic energy, erudition and bite. They even emulate his mock peremptory ...”

“... meanings of words while ignoring their literal meanings,’ he advises readers attempting Hart Crane. ‘This is difficult, but easier if you read very quickly, and aloud.’ (The faux-solicitous note recalls one of his best jokes, in a review of David Lodge’s Working with Structuralism: ‘His title,’ Carey said, ‘has a ...”

“... gets some serious pages. The principal literary exhibits are the mother-bedevilled Hemingway and Hart Crane. Hemingway’s mother kicked him out of her house for staying out all night, explaining to him in a letter that a mother’s love is a bank, but that Ernest had overdrawn. He was 21 at the time, and according to Douglas all his writing can be seen ...”

“... of engaging in creative labour without the necessity of pleasing tetchy theatregoers. Idolising Hart Crane (Williams called Crane and Hemingway ‘two of the best bed-partners a sick old bitch can have’), Williams was attracted to the notion that poets were doomed to early deaths, and he included ...”

“... ordered it). He is dismayed to notice, when his thoughts turn to ending it all – in the style of Hart Crane or Robert Maxwell – that, wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are ...”

“... for New York and there linked up with the Greenwich Village/Dial set. He made friends with Hart Crane and tuned into the prevailing atmosphere of world-saving innovation. He tried to make a living as a freelance writer (he was always fretting about money in these early years), signed up to write a clutch of Civil War biographies, and when the ...”

“... Robert Frost around in his pocket, finds ‘good old Leaves of Grass’ in a bookshop, misses Hart Crane and channels Poe. When he hears church bells as a ‘clash and clangour’, we might think it’s a symptom of his fallen state until the reference is made explicit. No, it is not perdition, it is a poem. ‘Poe was exactly right ...”

“... set against the closed world of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Conrad shows O’Henry and Stephen Crane plucking characters from the crowd; Jacob Riis using photography to document the inhumanities of slum tenements, Stieglitz using it to make skyscrapers monumental; Oldenburg embracing the city by making toys out of monuments, and monuments out of ...”

“... intuitive powers of response. The pleasures of early reading – Bloom says in Agon (1982) that Hart Crane ‘cathected’ him ‘onto poetry’ when he was ten years old – must grow more remote with every return to the text. Crane’s ‘Marlovian rhetoric swept us in,’ Bloom recalls, ‘but as with Marlowe ...”

“... Even so, they did encourage this ‘strange boy’. Jarrell’s derivative verses – sub-Hart Crane followed by sub-Auden followed by sub-Frost – were printed in the Southern Review and the Kenyon Review, and before long his famous arrogance was let loose on the review pages of the New Republic. Jarrell was 21 when he published his first major ...”

“... on a tenor sax in a bop session. Williams’s literary heroes were Rilke, D.H. Lawrence, and Hart Crane, and his theatrical heroes were Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov – a photo of the last accompanied him wherever he went. Mix together all these colours on a New Orleans palette, add the playwright’s wonderful sense of the poetry of vernacular ...”

“... are those who lived on and in some cases went over the edge – Blake, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Trakl, Hart Crane, Artaud. The opposing of the visionary to the ordinary, the call for poetry to live dangerously, the invocation of Larkin as the epitome of grey on grey – these have been familiar cultural moves at least since Alvarez’s New Poetry ...”