“The Silken Skilled Transmemberment of Song”: Shelley, Romantic Visionary Quest, and the Poetry of Hart Crane

Abstract

Taking seriously the critical estimations of Harold Bloom and Michael O’Neill that Hart Crane is the true American inheritor of Shelley’s poetic legacy, my article explores the theme of Romantic visionary quest in Crane’s poetry. I argue that this peculiarly Shelleyan motif of visionary quest in Crane’s “Repose of Rivers”, “Praise for an Urn”, “Voyages”, “The Harbour Dawn”, and “Atlantis” acts as a prism through which to view Crane’s imaginative entanglements with the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats.