If you go to Cleveland, Ohio, you’ll discover that Hart Crane’s house has vanished; a stubby cenotaph marks the spot. Nearby, at a local university, there’s a landlocked statue of him, a singularly inadequate monument to a poet of the waters who met his fate at sea. Does he live on in critical conversations, at least? Ange Mlinko, for instance, writing recently on Frank O’Hara in the London Review of Books, noted that ‘Among the young poets at Harvard, lines were drawn between Auden and Yeats, and Stevens and Eliot, with O’Hara and Ashbery championing the underdogs Auden and Stevens’. The latter hold their sway even now, but post-Derek Walcott (who always talked about him), post-William Logan (who has always denigrated him), you seldom hear poets, especially younger ones, discuss Hart Crane in any depth. The world has changed, is always changing, but Crane, as ever, remains an elusive – even problematic – figure. So where might we find him now?

Since his tragic early death, he’s been enshrined in two good editions of his collected poems, and then again in the authoritative Library of America series, but while living he was mainly to be found in the pages of contemporary literary journals. No doubt those Harvard poets were reading, and aspiring to be published in, many of the same ones Crane had; and they’d have met him in those pages. But Crane was among the first generations of American poets to seek this particular path to success. The US has no Pantheon, but it does have ...