In a 1991 interview with Antonio Weiss of "The Paris Review", the literary critic Harold Bloom talked about how Crane, along with William Blake, initially sparked his interest in literature at a very young age: I was preadolescent, ten or eleven years old. I still remember the extraordinary delight, the extraordinary force that Crane and Blake brought to me—in particular Blake's rhetoric in the longer poems—though I had no notion what they were about. I picked up a copy of "The Collected Poems of Hart Crane" in the Bronx Library. I still remember when I lit upon the page with the extraordinary trope, "O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits / The agile precincts of the lark's return." I was just swept away by it, by the Marlovian rhetoric. I still have the flavor of that book in me. Indeed it's the first book I ever owned. I begged my oldest sister to give it to me, and I still have the old black and gold edition she gave me for my birthday back in 1942. . .I suppose the only poet of the twentieth century that I could secretly set above Yeats and Stevens would be Hart Crane.