The Machine that Sings: Modernism, Hart Crane and the Culture of the Body

Examining how Crane's corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career, The Machine ThatSings focuses on four texts in which Crane's preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge. Tapper treats Voyages, The Wine Merchant, and Possessions as a triptych of erotic poems in which Crane plays out alternative resolutions to the dialectic between purity and defilement, a conceptual dynamic which Tapper argues is central to both Crane's poetics of difficulty and his represent...