Words for Hart Crane
"When the Pulitzers showered on some dope or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap, few people would consider why I took to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam's phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds. Because I knew my Whitman like a book, stranger in America, tell my country: I, Catullus redivivus, once the rage of the Village and Paris, used to play my role of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs who hungered by the Place de la Concorde. My profit was a pocket with a hole. Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, must lay his heart out for my bed and board."
Robert Lowell uses the psuedo-sonnet form to create a poem in the voice of Hart Crane – another famous poet who wrote most of his poems in formal poetic styles, like sonnets.
Words for Hart Crane - meaning Summary
Recognition Without Support
The poem imagines Hart Crane speaking in a bitter, self-dramatizing voice. It links his poverty, sexuality, literary ambition, and resentment of cultural recognition, contrasting his precarious life with prizes granted to lesser writers. References to Whitman, Catullus, and Shelley place Crane in a lineage of outsider poets, while the final demand suggests that genuine admiration must include material and emotional support, not merely praise.
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