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The Broken Tower (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)

At a glance:

The Poem

“The Broken Tower” was the last poem that Hart Crane composed before committing suicide in 1932, and the poem does indeed have the eerie quality of a poetic last will and testament. Crane suffered from a chronic bent toward self-destructiveness, however, and much of his poetry explored the processes, purpose, and frustrations of the poetic sensibility confronting raw experience head-on in highly charged verbal arenas.

“The Broken Tower,” whose title connotes a shattered or fractured vision, is composed in ten stanzas, each a perfect quatrain. In the very...

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