[malcolm cowley] it was madness it was technology, it was unhappiness it was bustle, it was noise, butrd marvelous jazz all over this damn place. there was a frenzy of the age that finally much as we tried to avoid it seized us from within. new york, for him, was the intoxication of nights on the town. it was truly the jazz age. you danced. in the broader sense i think the marriage of faustus and hel is a marriage of machinery and myth. i think crane's complete belief is that much as he admired the power and tried to represent the power of contemporary machinery, that he knew that the faustian part of modern man the doomed part of man is the machine that helen is the old beauty that fuses. that first impact of power-- meeting helen on the subway-- is to reinvest that myth not with nostalgia-- in eliot, there are always references to a further lost beauty. in the conditional is where the difference lies. but in a sense pound and eliot are conditional poets in terms of time-- what could have happened what should have been-- but in crane it is "this is now. i've got to make it be now." [h