John Berryman's observation in 1950 that the poems "still--in standard anthologies--look very weird" echoes Harry Thurston Peck who, in calling
The Black Riders "the most notable contribution to literature to which the present year has given birth," remarked on Crane's "weirdness" (
Bookman, May 1895). Such comment is characteristic of responses to Crane's poetry, ranging as they do from W.D. Howells's slightly puzzled observation that the poems "do not seem to relate directly to the work of any other writer" to Daniel G. Hoffman's comment that "his style in verse is not only individual, it is unique" to the blunt and frequent query, "Is this poetry"" Crane has no distinctly visible antecedents, and Amy Lowell's judgment, that Crane is a poet "without a period....
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