Words for Hart Crane by Robert Lowell

Words for Hart Crane

“When the Pulitzers showered on some dope

or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap,

few people would consider why I took

to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam’s

phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds.

Because I knew my Whitman like a book,

stranger in America, tell my country: I,

Catullus redivivus, once the rage

of the Village and Paris, used to play my role

of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs

who hungered by the Place de la Concorde.

My profit was a pocket with a hole.

Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,

must lay his heart out for my bed and board.”