fine time for demonwork

ubiquitous, doubtful and circuitous:

one house is like another, one subscription
floods the garage, another the lone porchlight, yellow
with forgone bugs, the lemons,

the rugs ablaze, fine time for demonwork
crysophase, aluminium in delight
insecticides and agents, portal cone

to Yuma, the accused, the accursed, the sincere
all together, in the pitchblack. Kumquats
sweet fabled factotum, alight
who discovered the land without fury

the house of amedee ozenfant is partially

glass, said shower is blue porcelain, a cup,
fortunately we left that part out, where
everything changes into something

elsewhere, otherwise, we have our spies
ah ha, a bear, ingenious participant
in the sense of the otiose, comrade

oaf illustrated, take down the sign, Seminoles,
now there is the picturesque,
likeable as they are, heartbrake

the glasskiller comes.

Hart Crane. White Buildings. New York, Boni & Liveright, 1926.

Hart Crane’s first book of poetry White Buildings, was published when he was 27 years old. Both Gorham Munson and Waldo Frank helped in getting it published and it had an introduction by Allen Tate and blurb by Eugene O’Neill. It was widely reviewed, and very favorably by Yvor Winters, Laura Riding, Edmund Wilson and Mark Van Doren. Crane’s lush romantic vision and Elizabethan rhetoric were in some ways antithetical to the spirit of the times; he rejected the austerity of literary modernists and the machinery of the modern, materialistic age. His poems are spiritual and in fact, religious in nature, without being tied to any particular sect. He was concerned with the nature and development of the spirit and was consuming with longing for transcendence. His densely exploratory use of language and his rich, dramatic diction however were characteristic of the time, as was the intense contemporary resonance of his subjects, including skyscrapers, wine, drunkenness, sex and Charlie Chaplin :

“I am moved to put Chaplin with the poets (of today); hence the ‘we.’ In other words, he, especially in The Kid, made me feel myself, as a poet, as being “in the same boat” with him. Poetry, the human feelings, “the kitten,” is so crowded out of the humdrum, rushing mechanical scramble of today that the man who would preserve them must duck and camouflage for dear life to keep them or himself from annihilation.”
Hart Crane to William Wright, October 1921