White Buildings

Crane's first collection of poems, published when he was twenty-seven, displays a prodigious gift already at the height of its powers. Harold Bloom writes of Hart Crane: "Genius is a mystery resistant to reductive analysis, whether sociobiological, psychological, or historical. Like Milton, Pope, and Tennyson, the youthful Crane was a consecrated poet before he was an adolescent." White Buildings introduced Crane's poetry to a public largely unprepared for his orphic grandeur and overt homoeroticism.