This book focuses on American poet Hart Crane's first volume of poetry, White Buildings (1926). Along with close, sensitive readings of individual poems, this study provides the first detailed analysis of how Crane's philosophy of poetic composition, as expressed in his letters and essays, influenced the sequence of lyric poems which comprise his first book. Smith effectively shows how this neglected book serves as the precursor to Crane's epic poem of America, The Bridge.

This study moves through a close, careful reading of each poem, utilizing linguistic, tabular, and literary historical approaches to build an overall assessment of the collection as a series of experimental transformations, fused experiences, and poetic chronicles. Paying detailed attention to the relationship between formal experimentation and biographical experience, the study presents a poet dedicated to the search for appropriate techniques with which to encapsulate the fleeting experiences of life, a worthy continuer of the tradition of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Pound, and T.S. Eliot.