Slater Brown was the first writer I think I ever knew.
I met him when I was still in college
and very hopeful and very lost as to what I could myself ever
hope to do.
And I found him a most sympathetic man.
And he told me a great deal about Crane.
And also in my own reading I've come
to feel very closely the character of emotion
that Crane was attempting to register.
And the particular situation he had in the 40s
was, of course, that he was not highly regarded as a poet.
The formalist criticism that then predominated
tended to feel that "The Bridge," for example,
was a technical failure and therefore the poet who wrote it
of no real interest.
Well, in any case, this poem: