One afternoon back in the 1970s, I was browsing through the sale table at the Cornell University bookstore when a shopworn paperback caught my eye: The Complete Poems of Stephen Crane. I remember saying to myself, “The author of The Red Badge of Courage wrote poetry?” I picked up the book, skimmed the first several pages, and paused at the third poem. Like the others, it bore no title, simply a roman numeral, but it took my breath away:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

After murmuring “Wow”—the correct critical response, by the way—I read the poem over until I’d memorized it. Eerie, paradoxical, without a bit of flab, it seemed to me then, as now, unfussily perfect. I wasn’t quite sure of its meaning, but what did that matter? That pared-down verbal finesse and a kind of Grand Guignol visionary power were an irresistible combination.

Many of the writers featured in the American Poets Project are, like Samuel Menashe or Kenneth Fearing, relatively unknown to younger readers.1 Nobody could say that about Stephen Crane (1871–1900). Every high-school student alive has read—or been forced to read—The Red Badge of Courage(1895), and nearly every college English major has, at one point