Hart Crane

Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Inspired by the Romantics and his fellow Modernists, Crane wrote highly stylized poetry, often noted for its complexity. His collection White Buildings (1926), featuring "Chaplinesque", "At Melville's Tomb", "Repose of Rivers" and "Voyages", helped to cement his place in the avant-garde literary scene of the time. The long poem The Bridge (1930) is an epic inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge.

Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. He dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year and left for New York City, promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University. Crane took various jobs, including in copywriting and advertising. Throughout the early 1920s, various small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him among the avant-garde a respect that White Buildings ratified and strengthened. His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge, intended to be an uplifting counter to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Initial critical reaction to it was mixed, with many praising the scope but criticizing the quality of the poems. On April 27, 1932, Crane, in an inebriated state, jumped off the steamship USS Orizaba and into the Atlantic Ocean while the ship was en route from Vera Cruz to New York via Havana, Cuba. He left no suicide note, but witnesses to his jump believed he was intentionally killing himself. Throughout his life, he had multiple homosexual relations, many of which were described in, or otherwise influenced, his poetry. He had one known female partner, Peggy Cowley, around a year before his death.

Contemporary opinion of Crane's work was mixed, with poets including Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens criticizing his work, and others, including William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings, praising it. William Rose Benét wrote that, with The Bridge, Crane "failed in creating what might have been a truly great poem" but that it "reveals potencies in the author that may make his next work even more remarkable". Allen Tate called Crane "one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give the age away." and businessman who invented the Life Savers candy and held the patent, but sold it for $2,900 before the brand became popular. His aunt Zell Hart Deming gave funds to her nephew to support his early career.

In 1894, the family moved to Warren, Ohio where his father opened a maple syrup company, which he sold in 1908 to Corn Products Refining Company. In April 1911, his father opened a chocolate manufacturing and retailing company, the Crane Chocolate Company. The family moved to Cleveland in 1911, into a house at 1709 East 115th Street. In 1913, Clarence Crane's parents purchased the residence across the street.

Hart Crane began attending East High School around 1913–1914. in a feature entitled "Oscar Wilde: Poems in His Praise". The poem is named after Oscar Wilde's cell in The Ballad of Reading Gaol Crane dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year The same year, he attempted to enlist in the military, but was rejected due to being a minor. and a worker in his father's factory. In 1925, he briefly lived with Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate. The two had a dispute with Crane due to the mess his belongings made throughout the house. Additionally, Crane and Tate had a disagreement over the negative outlook of T. S. Eliot's work. This prompted them to leave two letters under his door requesting that he move out, which he did. He wrote his mother and grandmother in the spring of 1924:

Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the Statue of Liberty, way down the harbour, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right! All of the great new skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are marshaled directly across from you, and there is a constant stream of tugs, liners, sail boats, etc in procession before you on the river! It's really a magnificent place to live. This section of Brooklyn is very old, but all the houses are in splendid condition and have not been invaded by foreigners...

White Buildings (1926)

Throughout the early 1920s, many small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him respect among the avant-garde which was later cemented by the 1926 publication of White Buildings. On May 1, 1926, he went to Isla de la Juventud to reside in his mother's family residence there. He received a contract from Liveright Publishing to publish White Buildings in July. a Danish merchant mariner, whom "Voyages" is generally considered to be about. an impasse, and characterized by 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". Edmund Wilson said Crane had "a style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style which was ... not ... applied to any subject at all." until his lover, Opffer, invited him to live in Opffer's father's home at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights. Crane was overjoyed at the views the location afforded him.

The Bridge (1930)

The first known mention of The Bridge was in a 1923 letter to Gorham Munson in which he wrote:

Criticism since the late 20th century has suggested reading Crane's poems—"The Broken Tower", "My Grandmother's Love Letters", the "Voyages" series, and others—with an eye to homosexual meanings in the text. Queer theorist Tim Dean argues that the obscurity of Crane's style owes partially to the necessities of being a semi-public homosexual—not quite closeted, but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open: "The intensity responsible for Crane's particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces a kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy."

Thomas Yingling objects to the traditional, New Critical and Eliotic readings of Crane, arguing that the "American myth criticism and formalist readings" have "depolarized and normalized our reading of American poetry, making any homosexual readings seem perverse." Even more than a personal or political problem, though, Yingling argues that such "biases" obscure much of what the poems make clear; he cites, for instance, the last lines of "My Grandmother's Love Letters" from White Buildings as a haunting description of estrangement from the norms of (heterosexual) family life:

Brian Reed has contributed to a project of critical reintegration of queer criticism with other critical methods, suggesting that an overemphasis on the sexual biography of Crane's poetry can skew a broader appreciation of his overall work. In one example of Reed's approach, he published a close reading of Crane's lyric poem, "Voyages", (a love poem that Crane wrote for his lover Emil Opffer) on the Poetry Foundation website, analyzing the poem based strictly on the content of the text itself and not on outside political or cultural matters.

Accusations of plagiarism

thumb|A 1916 self-portrait of Samuel Greenberg.

In mid-December 1926, Crane visited William Murrell Fisher in Woodstock, a literary critic whom he first met via their mutual friend Gorham Munson. There, Fisher shared with Crane multiple manuscripts of poems by Samuel Greenberg, a little-known poet who had died in 1917. Writing to Gorham Munson on December 20, Crane wrote, "This poet, Grünberg, which Fisher nursed until he died of consumption at a Jewish Hospital in New York was a Rimbaud in embryo ... Fisher has shown me an amazing amount of material, some of which I am copying and will show you when I get back."

Morris Greenberg, Samuel's brother, had given five of Samuel's notebooks to Fisher so that they could be published. Crane copied forty-two poems from the notebooks, which he borrowed from Fisher for a period of less than a month. Many of Crane's poems consisted of lines and phrases taken from Greenberg's poems, always unattributed. Crane's poem "Emblems of Conduct", the third in White Buildings, consisted solely of rearranged lines from Greenberg's poems. Writer and critic Samuel R. Delany argues Crane merely tried to draw attention to an unknown poet and wanted readers to experience for themselves the delight of realizing one of his influences without him telling them.

Yvor Winters and Allen Tate both praised White Buildings but considered The Bridge to be a failure.

Legacy

Mid-century American poets, such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell, cited Crane as a significant influence. Both poets also wrote about Crane in their poetry. Berryman wrote him one of his famous elegies in The Dream Songs, and Lowell published his "Words for Hart Crane" in Life Studies (1959): "Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, / must lay his heart out for my bed and board." Lowell thought that Crane was the most important American poet of the generation to come of age in the 1920s, stating that "[Crane] got out more than anybody else ... he somehow got New York City; he was at the center of things in the way that no other poet was."

Tennessee Williams said that he wanted to be "given back to the sea" at the "point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back". One of Williams's last plays, a "ghost play" titled Steps Must Be Gentle, explores Crane's relationship with his mother.

In a 1991 interview with Antonio Weiss of The Paris Review, the literary critic Harold Bloom talked about how Crane, along with William Blake, initially sparked his interest in literature at a very young age: <blockquote>I was preadolescent, ten or eleven years old. I still remember the extraordinary delight, the extraordinary force that Crane and Blake brought to me—in particular Blake's rhetoric in the longer poems—though I had no notion what they were about. I picked up a copy of The Collected Poems of Hart Crane in the Bronx Library. I still remember when I lit upon the page with the extraordinary trope, "O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits / The agile precincts of the lark's return." I was just swept away by it, by the Marlovian rhetoric. I still have the flavor of that book in me. Indeed it's the first book I ever owned. I begged my oldest sister to give it to me, and I still have the old black and gold edition she gave me for my birthday back in 1942 . . . I suppose the only poet of the twentieth century that I could secretly set above Yeats and Stevens would be Hart Crane.</blockquote>

Bloom also authored the introduction to the centennial edition of the Complete Poems of Hart Crane.

Thomas Lux has stated, "If the devil came to me and said 'Tom, you can be dead and Hart can be alive,' I'd take the deal in a heartbeat if the devil promised, when arisen, Hart would have to go straight into A.A."

The literary critic Adam Kirsch has argued that "[Crane has been] a special case in the canon of American modernism, his reputation never quite as secure as that of Eliot or Stevens."

In 2011, the American poet Gerald Stern wrote an essay on Crane in which he stated, "Some, when they talk about Crane, emphasize his drinking, his chaotic life, his self-doubt, and the dangers of his sexual life, but he was able to manage these things, even though he died at 32, and create a poetry that was tender, attentive, wise, and radically original." At the conclusion of his essay, Stern writes, "Crane is always with me, and whatever I wrote, short poem or long, strange or unstrange—his voice, his tone, his sense of form, his respect for life, his love of the word, his vision have affected me. But I don't want, in any way, to exploit or appropriate this amazing poet whom I am, after all, so different from, he who may be, finally, the great poet, in English, of the twentieth century."

Beyond poetry, Crane's suicide inspired several works of art by noted artist Jasper Johns, including "Periscope", "Land's End", and "Diver", as well as A Symphony of Three Orchestras by Elliott Carter (inspired by The Bridge) and the painting Eight Bells' Folly, Memorial for Hart Crane by Marsden Hartley.

Depictions

Crane is the subject of The Broken Tower, a 2011 American student film by the actor James Franco who wrote, directed, and starred in the film which was the master's thesis project for his MFA in filmmaking at New York University. He loosely based his script on Paul Mariani's 1999 nonfiction book The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane. Despite being a student film, The Broken Tower was shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2011 and received DVD distribution in 2012 by Focus World Films.

Crane appears as a character in Samuel R. Delany's story "Atlantis: Model 1924", and in The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

Bibliography

White Buildings. (1926)
The Bridge. Brooklyn Heights. (1930)
Last letters of Hart Crane: with a commentary on the poet and the man. (1934)
Two letters : Hart Crane. (1934)
The Collected Poems of Hart Crane. Ed. Waldo Frank. UK: Boriswood.
The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932. Ed. Brom Weber. (1952)
Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, Ed. Brom Weber, New York:Liveright Publishing Corporation. (1966)
The poet's vocation: selections from letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud, & Hart Crane, Ed. William Burford. (1967).
Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923–1932, Ed. Susan Jenkins Brown. (1968)
Twenty-one letters from Hart Crane to George Bryan, Ohio State University Libraries. (1968)
Letters of Hart Crane and His Family, ed. Tom Lewis, New York: Columbia University Press. (1974)
Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence, ed. Thomas Parkinson, Berkeley: University of California Press (1978)
Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, rebuttal and review : a new Crane letter, reprint by Duke University (1978).
Hart Crane to Charles Harris: February 20, 1926, Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Libraries. (1978)
Complete poems, Ed. Brom Weber, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. (1984)
The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon, New York: Liveright (1986)
O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows (1997)
Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Langdon Hammer, New York: The Library of America (2006)

Notes

References

External links

Yale College Lecture on Hart Crane audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
The Fales Library of NYU's guide to the Richard W. Rychtarik/Hart Crane Papers
Brian Reed on Voyages (at Poetry Foundation)
Modern American Poetry: Hart Crane (1899–1932)
Finding aid to Hart Crane papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

White Buildings (1926)

The Bridge (1930)

Accusations of plagiarism

Legacy

Depictions

Bibliography

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

Biographies

Selected criticism

External links