Yale professor Langdon Hammer examines the early poetry of Hart Crane in this lecture from Modern Poetry (ENGL 310). He opens with a close reading of the poem "Legend," then turns to Crane's engagement with T.S. Eliot, focusing on how Crane's self-image as a visionary, Romantic, and erotic poet responds to "The Waste Land," particularly the "Death by Water" section. The lecture moves to "Voyages" and "At Melville's Tomb," tracking Crane's idiosyncratic diction and invented language. Hammer treats Crane's difficulty as deliberate, a poetic project built in reaction against Eliot's despair, and walks through specific lines to show how the neologisms function. Recorded in spring 2007 as part of Yale's Open Yale Courses series, the talk assumes some familiarity with modernist poetry but stays grounded in the texts themselves.