However,—let Baudelaire and Joyce stand together, as much as any such thing in literary comparison will allow. The principle eccentricity evinced by both is a penetration into life common only to the greatest. If people resent a thrust which discovers some of their own entrails to themselves, I can see no reason for resorting to indiscriminate comparisons, naming colors of the rainbow, or advertising the fact that they have recently been forced to recognize a few of their personal qualities. Those who are capable of being only mildly “shocked” very naturally term the cost a penny, but were they capable of paying a few pounds for the same thinking, experience and realization by and in themselves, they could reserve their pennies for work minor to Joyce’s.

Hart Crane, “Joyce and Ethics”, in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, edited by Brom Weber