Editing Stephen Crane (section)

===Poetry===
{{quote box|bgcolor=#c6dbf7|width= 20%|quote=
<poem>
Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page.
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
</poem>|source= — Stephen Crane<ref>Crane, ''Complete Poems'', p. 49</ref>}}
Crane's poems, which he preferred to call "lines", are typically not given as much scholarly attention as his fiction; no anthology contained Crane's verse until 1926.<ref>Hoffman, p. 64</ref>  Although it is not certain when Crane began to write poetry seriously, he once said that his overall poetic aim was "to give my ideas of life as a whole, so far as I know it".<ref name="berg25">Bergon, p. 25</ref>  The poetic style used in both of his books of poetry, ''The Black Riders and Other Lines'' and ''War is Kind'', was unconventional for the time in that it was written in [[free verse]] without [[rhyme]], [[meter (poetry)|meter]], or even titles for individual works.  They are typically short in length; although several poems, such as "Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind", use stanzas and refrains, most do not.<ref>Hoffman, p. 62</ref>  Crane also differed from his peers and later poets in that his work contains [[allegory]], [[dialectic]] and narrative situations.<ref>Hoffman, p. 65</ref>

Critic Ruth Miller claimed that Crane wrote "an intellectual poetry rather than a poetry that evokes feeling, a poetry that stimulates the mind rather than arouses the heart".<ref name="berg25"/>  In the most complexly organized poems, the significance of the states of mind or feelings is ambiguous, but Crane's poems tend to affirm certain elemental attitudes, beliefs, opinions and stances toward God, man and the universe.<ref name="berg25"/>  ''The Black Riders'' in particular is essentially a dramatic concept and the poems provide continuity within the dramatic structure.  There is also a dramatic interplay in which there is frequently a major voice reporting an incident seen or experienced.  The second voice or additional voices represent a point of view which is revealed to be inferior; when these clash, a dominant attitude emerges.<ref>Katz, p. xxxv</ref>