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Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was a U.S. poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote poetry that was traditional in form, difficult and often archaic in language, and which sought to express something more than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot's poetry. Though frequently condemned as being difficult beyond comprehension, Crane has proved in the long run to be one of the most influential poets of his generation.
Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, Hart Crane’s father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business by inventing the Life Saver. Crane’s mother and father were constantly fighting, and in 1916 they divorced. It was shortly thereafter that Hart dropped out of high school and headed to New York City. Between 1917 and 1924 he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, working as an advertising copywriter and a worker in his father’s factory.
From Crane's letters, it appears that New York was where he felt most at home, and much of his poetry is set there. Crane was homosexual. Crane associated his homosexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as a pariah in relation to society. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary in order for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work.
Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, 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 lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and a powerful sequence of erotic poems called "Voyages," written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant marineman.
"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 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." He meant an epic poem. This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.
The Bridge received poor reviews for the most part, but much worse than that was Crane’s sense of failure. It was during the late '20s, while he was finishing The Bridge, that his drinking, always a problem, got notably worse.
While on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico in 1931-32, his drinking continued while he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. His only heterosexual affair—with Peggy Cowley, the wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley—was one of the few bright spots, and "The Broken Tower," his last great lyric poem (maybe his greatest lyric poem), emerges from that affair. Crane still felt himself a failure, though, in part because he recommenced homosexual activity despite his relationship with Cowley. Just before noon on April 27, 1932, on a steamship passage back to New York from Mexico—right after he was beaten up for making sexual advances to a male crewmember, which may have appeared to confirm his idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual—he committed suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed Crane's intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard.
Hart Crane's Poetry and Prose
- White Buildings (1926) ISBN 0871401797
- The Bridge (1930) ISBN 0871400251
- The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose (1966)
- O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane (1997)
""""And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another.
Hart Crane
And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
Hart Crane
I got so I simply gagged everytime I sat before my desk to write an ad.
Hart Crane
I have wanted to write you more than once, but it will take many letters to let you know what I mean (for myself, at least) when I say that I have seen the Word made Flesh.
Hart Crane
I think the sea has thrown itself upon me and been answered, at least in part, and I believe I am a little changed - not essentially, but changed and transubstantiated as anyone is who has asked a question and been answered.
Hart Crane
It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.
Hart Crane
The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.
Hart Crane
The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.
Hart Crane
Your primary presumption that The Bridge was proffered as an epic has no substantial foundation. You know quite well that I doubt that our present stage of cultural development is so ordered yet as to provide the means or method for such an organic manifestation as that.
Hart Crane |
