News at Eleven: In 1926, in a letter to the editor

of Poetry, Harriet Monroe, replying to her complaints about obscurity in his poem "At Melville's Tomb," [Hart] Crane set down his defense of his poetry and offered one of his most detailed and useful explanations of what his lines actually meant, while making it clear that their meaning, while concrete and direct, was a dull business indeed compared to what we might call their force. The first stanza reads:

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

"Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else)," Monroe wrote.

from The New York Review of Books: A Great American Visionary

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