Author at twenty-one of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the first naturalistic novel of American slum life, and at twenty-four of The Red Badge of Courage (1895), an American classic which catapulted him to literary fame, Stephen Crane wrote four additional novels, more than a hundred short stories (including "The Blue Hotel," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," and "The Open Boat"), and close to a thousand pages of journalism and sketches (including innumerable war reports, among them "Marines Signalling Under Fire at Guantanamo" and the perhaps fictional"The Upturned Face") before his death at the age of twenty-eight. In contrast, his output in verse was small. Crane had neither a sustained poetic career nor any apparent desire for one. There are 136 poems in the University of Virginia edition of his works--barely 1,800 lines; "mind you, I never call them poems myself," he wrote Nellie Crouse in January 1896; instead...