Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him among the avant-garde a respect that "White Buildings" (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. "White Buildings" contains many of Crane's best poems, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen", and "Voyages", a sequence of erotic poems. They were written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner. "Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of "The Waste Land", he also said it was "so damned dead", an impasse, and characterized by a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities". Crane's self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America".