Representation of Modernist Experimentation in Hart Crane’s Select Poems

Abstract

This study examines the role of figurative language as a poetic prototype in the select poems of Hart Crane, with particular focus on White Buildings. It argues that Crane’s use of metaphor, symbolism, and imagistic compression functions not merely as ornamentation but as a central mode of meaning-making that articulates his transcendental vision. Through close textual analysis, the paper traces Crane’s poetic development from impressionism to a distinctive symbolic idiom that integrates Elizabethan conceits, modernist experimentation, and Romantic idealism. Poems such as “At Melville’s Tomb,” “Voyages,” and “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” reveal how figurative language enables Crane to reconcile personal experience with universal themes of time, love, memory, and artistic creation. The study situates Crane within the modernist tradition while highlighting his unique contribution to American poetry through a figurative strategy that seeks harmony and order amid cultural and spiritual fragmentation.