Epilogue ‘The Shelley of my Age’: Hart Crane’s Afterlives

The book concludes by moving from the communities of his lifetime to explore his afterlives and presence in contemporary poetry. I begin with elegies to Crane published in Poetry, examining the magazine’s ongoing curation of his reception. The epilogue concludes with a critical examination of patterns in poems to Crane published elsewhere, and the profound influence of Crane on twentieth-century and contemporary poets (while his critical reputation has somewhat languished), including Geoffrey Hill, Mark Ford, Eileen Myles and Adrienne Rich. I see poems such as Hill’s ‘Improvisations for Hart Crane’, Ford’s ‘The Death of Hart Crane’, Myles’s ‘hart!’ and Rich’s ‘“The Night Has a Thousand Eyes’ as forming a body of ‘creative criticism’ that challenges the dominant critical narratives that surround Crane’s poetry. I argue that these poems form, to different degrees, critical essays-in-verse on the poet and his legacy. Crane’s invigorating legacy is seen as alive and well in these varied poetic engagements with his work, which are read as implicit meditations on Crane’s ill-founded reputation for difficulty and his association with grand ‘failure’.