It is one of the great shames of American literature that the name Stephen Crane inevitably conjures up images of red badges and the concept of courage. The fact of that matter is that Crane produced a wealth of literature, many of which far exceed the quality of his career-defining novel. Crane remains positioned as one of America’s most gifted short story writers, but the truly revolutionary status as poet has not yet been fully plumbed within the academic canon.
The reason for Crane’s lower-than-deserved place within the realm of American poets may have something to do with timing. Just as his short fiction reveals an ironic mind about a century ahead of his time, so was his poetry at odds with the fashion of the time. By virtue of birth, Crane belonged to last dying gasp of sentimentalism as the taste of the country evolved into desiring more realism. That massive dose of irony coursing through his literary DNA may actually be nowhere more fully expressed than in one Crane’s iconic dives into the power of poetic brevity:
A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
Had Crane risen to prominence just a few short decades later, his poetry would have been slotted alongside that of E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. That extraordinary worldview filled with an existential strain of philosophical musing toward a world of almost inconceivable ambiguity is directly at odds with all the comfortable assurances making the close of the 1800’s. Everything would change in the 20th century and quite quickly, too. America’s longtime number one most beloved poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was about to fall from favor at a jaw-dropping speed as mythic narratives spins promulgating American exceptionalism gave way to the kind of self-reflected negation of that myth as expressed in the final three lines of Crane’s “In the Desert.”
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
Crane’s stock among American poets has been slowly and steadily rising, but even more than a century after his death, he remains for the most—like Herman Melville—under-appreciated and severely devalued for his contributions to the evolution of verse. Some of this can be attributed, of course, to well-deserved appreciation of prose, but it still remains to future scholars and critics to do the work that needs to be done to bring Crane up to the position of prominence his verse deserves simply on the basis of the poetry itself.
