O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. This item is unavailable.O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane

It must have been exhausting to have been around the hyperconscious Hart Crane, whose poems, like these letters, throb with the intensity of a fevered life. Ultimately, Crane grew tired of himself: at age 32, he killed himself with characteristic panache, laying his neatly folded overcoat across a ship's railing and vaulting into the sea like a gymnast. During his brief life, he epitomized the excesses of the Jazz Age, as chronicled here in letters to Sherwood Anderson, e.e. cummings, Katherine Anne Porter, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and many others who roughed out the contours of those heady times. There are 355 letters in all, more than a third of which appear for the first time in book form. The editors, both of whom have written extensively on Crane, are to be applauded vigorously for the helpful background supplied in the running commentary that opens each of the seven "chapters" into which these letters are grouped. An excellent purchase for literature collections.?David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
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This is an important work for students of Crane and perhaps for anyone interested in a life of poetry writing. Of the 355 selected letters, 141 did not appear in the previous collection of Crane's letters in 1952. As the introduction notes, since Crane left few literary essays or book reviews, these letters stand as a significant expression of his ideas about art, poetry, and culture. Perhaps even more significantly, however, they show his struggle to develop as a poet. Somewhat isolated by his early work situation in Cleveland, perenially plagued by financial difficulties, and torn between his eventually divorced parents, Crane nonetheless unhesitatingly established and maintained literary correspondences with kindred spirits and writers (such as Sherwood Anderson) whose work he admired. In the letters, Crane argues about the direction of poetry, unabashedly evaluates other writers of the day, and tells of memorable or inspiring encounters with Chaplin, O'Neill, and others. As to his own work, he reveals the difficulty he had making progress and his relentless solicitations for uncensored feedback from his peers. Jim O'Laughlin