Hart Crane

Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio, United States – April 26, 1932) was a U.S. poet. Setting himself against the modernist poetic ideals represented by T.S. Eliot, Crane wrote poetry that was traditional in form, obscure and often archaic in language, and which sought to affirm an optimistic approach to modern American life. 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.

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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. Part of his love for New York may have sprung from its tolerance—as well as its thriving gay subculture.

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 that he had not succeeded in his goal. It was during the late '20s, while he was finishing The Bridge, that his drinking, always a problem, got notably worse. The partial failure of the poem perhaps had something to do with his increasing alcoholism.

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 26, 1932, on a steamship passage back to New York from Mexico—right after he was beat up for hitting on a male crewmember, which may have appeared to confirm his idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual —he jumped into the Gulf of Mexico, committing suicide.

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)

See also

• Walt Whitman (a hero to Crane)
• Yvor Winters (a friend and critic of Crane)
• Christopher Marlowe (an influence on Crane's poetry)
• Harold Bloom (literary critic inspired by Crane)
• Modernist poetry in English
• Poetry of the United States

External links

• Modern American Poetry: Hart Crane (1899-1932) (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/crane/crane.htm)