Crane, Monroe, and Toibin

In the April 17 issue of The New York Review of Books, one of my favorite authors, Colm Toibin, plumbs the recently-published Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters.

I haven't read much of Crane, but after coming across this little snippet of exchange between Poetry editor Harriet Monroe and Crane regarding Crane's "At Melville's Tomb," I quickly ordered a copy from the library:

The first stanza reads:

Often beneath the wave, wide
from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones
he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he
watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were
obscured.

"Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else)," Monroe wrote. Crane in his reply admitted that

as a poet I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem.