Crane's strenuous optimism about America, his barely coded celebrations of homoerotic desire and his bejeweled, dense, late Romantic language made him perhaps the most fiercely cherished of modernists, despite or because of his short, passionate and controversial life: Crane (1899–1932) drowned in the Gulf of Mexico six years after completing his masterful long poem The Bridge
. While Crane's best poems have long been widely known, drafts, fragments and apprentice work have been hard to find, and only in 1997 did a fully reliable selection from his voluminous, revealing correspondence appear. Hammer, who assembled that edition, knows more than anyone else alive about Crane; his hefty collection of all the verse, all the published prose (there isn't much) and much of that correspondence (nearly three-quarters of this book) instantly becomes the standard edition. Vigorous, sometimes hyperbolic letters trace Crane's move from Cleveland to New York, his pursuit of the poetic sublime, his interactions with other modernist luminaries (William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer), his troubles with money, alcohol and family, and his peripatetic last years. (Oct.)
