A Mirror at the End of a Long Corridor: Moore, Crane, Closure

Abstract

The biographies of Hart Crane and Marianne Moore collide at one much trafficked intersection. Almost every comprehensive critical treatment of either author tells the story of how Moore, when at the helm of The Dial, revised and published a version of Crane’s “The Wine Menagerie” (under the new title “Again”) in its May 1926 issue. Moore cut the poem to less than half of its original length; Thomas Yingling suggests, with an oeuvre the size of Crane’s, this is “equivalent to deleting or rewriting one-fourth of a novel by Faulknerchrw(133) before publishing it” (Hart Crane 108).