In this first full analysis of the poetry of Stephen Crane, Daniel Hoffman defines Crane's intense sensibility and places his verse in the development of contemporary poetry. A collection of the writer's manuscripts and letters recently acquired by the Columbia University Libraries provides new information for this study, and seventeen poems are published here for the first time, as well as excerpts from newly recovered prose works.
Drawing upon new biographical materials, Mr. Hoffman explores Crane's religious background and his love affairs and relates their influence to the work of this experimental writer.
Crane's "imaginative world of menace, violence, and isolation" became his milieu of poetic expression, for he lacked the cultural background of other contemporary American poets. Experimenting with allegory, realism, symbolism, naturalism, and imagism, Crane was the chameleon of his literary generation. Mr. Hoffman proposes that Crane's aesthetic derived not from the French symbolists or impressionists to whom he is often compared and whose work he parallelled but from the writers of the mid-century American Renaissance.
The author traces the ethical coherence and the aesthetic assumptions that unify Crane's best work. He suggests that despite his uniqueness in his own time, Crane reflects a tradition stemming from Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman, and continuing after him to Hemingway.