White Buildings was the first collection (1926) of poetry by Hart Crane, an American modernist poet, critical to both lyrical and language poetic traditions.
The book features well-known pieces like "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," the " Voyages" series, and some of his most famous lyrics including "My Grandmother's Love Letters" and "Chaplinesque." Harold Bloom has argued that this collection alone, if perhaps taken with his later lyric, ' The Broken Tower,' could have secured Crane's reputation as one of the best American poets of the 20th century. [1]
Eugene O'Neill was happy to help Crane by writing a preface to White Buildings, but, increasingly frustrated with his failure to articulate an understanding of the poems, left it to Allen Tate to finish the piece. [2]
According to the Poetry Foundation, "this work earned [Crane] substantial respect as an imposing stylist, one whose lyricism and imagery recalled the French Romantics Baudelaire and Rimbaud". [3]
One notable review of the book was mixed. In The New Republic, Edmund Wilson wrote that Crane had "a remarkable style... almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style...[but it's] not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all". [4] Crane responded to this criticism by calling Wilson's article "half-baked". [5]
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell singled out "the mesmeric rhetoric of [the poem] 'Voyages II' [as] one of the most beautiful of all of those poems in which love, death, and sleep 'are fused for an instant in one floating flower'". [6]