surface phenomena

But to fool one’s self that definitions are being reached by merely referring frequently to skyscrapers, radio antennae, steam whistles, or other surface phenomena of our time is merely to paint a photograph.

—Hart Crane, “General Aims and Theories”

two kinds of poetry

Great writers must find their distinctive voice, and you can hear Robinson's in "Reuben Bright" (1897). He uses simple rhetoric, the emotion compressed in spare language. As the poet Winfield Townley Scott observed in his notebooks, there are basically two kinds of poetry. One is represented by Hart Crane's line "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise," the other by Robinson's "And he was all alone there when he died." One is a magic gesture of language, the other "a commentary on human life so concentrated as to give off considerable pressure." The greatest poets combine the two, Scott believed: Shakespeare often, Robinson himself now and then.

—Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life (Columbia University Press. © 2007)

drenched in words

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. When they come . . . they come as things in themselves; it is a matter of felicitous juggling!; and no amount of will or emotion can help the thing a bit.

—Hart Crane,The Letters of Hart Crane, November 26, 1921