Machine That Sings

<p>Examining how Crane's corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career <em>The Machine That</em><em>Sings</em> focuses on four texts in which Crane's preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge. Tapper treats <em>Voyages The Wine Merchant</em> and <em>Possessions</em> as a triptych of erotic poems in which Crane plays out alternative resolutions to the dialectic between purity and defilement a conceptual dynamic which Tapper argues is central to both Crane's poetics of difficulty and his representations of homosexual desire. Tapper concentrates on the three sections of <em>The Bridge</em> most concerned with recuperating animality: 'National Winter Garden ' 'The Dance ' and 'Cape Hatteras.'</p>