The Imaged Word: The Infrastructure of Hart Crane’s White Buildings

This book focuses on American poet Hart Crane’s first volume of poetry, White Buildings (1926). Along with close, sensitive readings of individual poems, this study provides the first detailed analysis of how Crane’s philosophy of poetic composition, as expressed in his letters and essays, influenced the sequence of lyric poems which comprise his first book. Smith effectively shows how this neglected book serves as the precursor to Crane’s epic poem of America, The Bridge.