Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American 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. is the 202nd day of the year (203rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1899 (MDCCCXCIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Friday [1] of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar). ... is the 117th day of the year (118th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1932 (MCMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link will display full 1932 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The poor poet A poet is a person who writes poetry. ... This article is about the art form. ... Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965), was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. ... In language, an archaism is the deliberate use of an older form that has fallen out of current use. ...

Taken by Walker Evans in 1930.

Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Walker Evans Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer made famous by his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. ...

Life and Career

Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, Hart Crane’s father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business with chocolate bars. He originally held the patent for the Life Saver, but sold his interest to another businessman right before the candy took off. 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. Garrettsville is a village located within Portage County in the US state of Ohio. ... Official language(s) English de facto Capital Columbus Largest city Columbus Largest metro area Greater Cleveland Area  Ranked 34th  - Total 44,825 sq mi (116,096 km²)  - Width 220 miles (355 km)  - Length 220 miles (355 km)  - % water 8. ... Official language(s) English de facto Capital Columbus Largest city Columbus Largest metro area Greater Cleveland Area  Ranked 34th  - Total 44,825 sq mi (116,096 km²)  - Width 220 miles (355 km)  - Length 220 miles (355 km)  - % water 8. ... This article is about the candy. ... New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ... Cleveland redirects here. ... A copywriter is a person who writes text, or copy, for clients. ...

Crane was gay and associated his sexuality 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. GAY can mean: Gay, a term referring to homosexual men or women The IATA code for Gaya Airport Category: ... Christian Science is a religious teaching regarding the efficacy of spiritual healing according to the interpretation of the Bible by Mary Baker Eddy, in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first published in 1875). ... Look up Pariah in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

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. A work similar to Marcel Duchamps Fountain Avant garde (written avant-garde) is a French phrase, one of many French phrases used by English speakers. ... The first collection of poetry by Hart Crane (1926), an American modernist poet critical to both lyrical and language poetic traditions. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Merchant Navy. ...

"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." 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 Waste Land (1922)[1] is a highly influential 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. ... The Bridge, first published in 1930, was Hart Cranes first, and only, attempt at an American long poem. ... For other uses, see Brooklyn Bridge (disambiguation). ...

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— occurred here, and "The Broken Tower," one of his last published poems, 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. Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded annually by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. ... Year 1931 (MCMXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1931 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... ... Malcolm Cowley, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1963 Malcolm Cowley (1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American novelist, poet, critic, and journalist. ... Gulf of Mexico in 3D perspective. ...

His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA" ("Voyager," John Unterecker, 1969).

Crane's suicide inspired several works of art by noted artist Jasper Johns, including "Periscope" and "Diver." Jasper Johnss Map, 1961 Jasper Johnss Flag, Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood,1954-55 Detail of Flag (1954-55). ...

^[1]

Poetic Influence

Crane has long been admired among poets, often passionately so. Some poet-critics have been ambivalent--one thinks Yvor Winters’s famous turnabout, reviewing The Bridge in Poetry--but even the turning-aways have a tone of affectionate critique: Winter’s review of The Bridge grants Crane’s status as a ‘poet of genius’ as a matter of course, even if he goes on to say that the poem augers for a ‘public catastrophe’^[2]. Crane was admired, if sometimes jealously, by much of the Greenwich Village and New England crowd: Allen Tate and Eugene O’Neill, of course, but also Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos Williams. And though some of his sharpest critics are well known--Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and a few others--Moore did published his work, as did T. S. Eliot, who was then moving even further out of Pound’s sphere. Arthur Yvor Winters (October 17, 1900 - January 26, 1968) was an American literary critic and poet, noted as a critic of poetry and embroiled in controversy. ... Poetry, published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. ... The Washington Square Arch Greenwich Village (IPA pronunciation: ), also called simply the Village, is a largely residential area on the west side of downtown (southern) Manhattan in New York City named after Greenwich, London. ... John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899 - February 9, 1979) was an American poet, essayist, and social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1943 - 1944. ... Eugene ONeill Eugene Gladstone ONeill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning American playwright. ... Kenneth Burke (May 5, 1897–November 19, 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. ... Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895 – June 12, 1972) was an American writer, noted chiefly for his literary criticism. ... E. E. Cummings Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as e. ... William Carlos Williams Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. ... Marianne Moore photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1948 Marianne Moore (December 11, 1887 - February 5, 1972) was a Modernist American poet and writer. ... Ezra Pound in 1913. ... Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965), was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. ...

Over the next two generations, Kerouac and Ginsberg read The Bridge together^[3], Berryman wrote him an elegy, and Robert 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.’ And Tennesse Williams, perhaps most eccentrically, wanted to be ‘given back to the sea’ at the ‘point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back...’ ^[4]. Jack Kerouac (pronounced ) (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist, writer, poet, and artist. ... Irwin Allen Ginsberg (IPA: ) (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet. ... John Allyn Berryman (originally John Allyn Smith) (October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. ... For other uses, see Elegy (disambiguation). ... Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917–September 12, 1977), born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was a highly regarded mid-twentieth-century American poet. ... Life Studies is the fourth book of poems by Robert Lowell, after Land of Unlikeness, Lord Wearys Castle, and The Mills of The Kavanaughs. ... Thomas Lanier Williams (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), better known by the pen name Tennessee Williams, was a noted playwright. ...

Such important affections have made Crane even more of a ‘poet’s poet,’ and much of Poet’s Bookshelf, a recent anthology of short, personal essays written by contemporary poets, is marked through with debts to him. Thomas Lux offers, for instance: ‘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.’ ^[5]. Not surprisingly, then, it is hard for a young writer to avoid his work--much, much harder than for the critic. Thomas Lux (1946 -- ) is an American poet. ...

Hart Crane's Poetry and Prose

• White Buildings (1926) ISBN 0-87140-179-7
• The Bridge (1930) ISBN 0-87140-025-1
• The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose (1966)
• O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane (1997)

The first collection of poetry by Hart Crane (1926), an American modernist poet critical to both lyrical and language poetic traditions. ...

Published as

• Complete Poems & Selected Letters (Langdon Hammer, ed.) (Library of America, 2006) ISBN 978-1-931082-99-0; ISBN 1-931082-99-5.

Volumes in the Library of America series The Library of America (LoA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. ...

Notes

1. ^ Times Literary Supplement 21 June 1917, no. 805, 299 Accessed from www.usask.ca, June 8, 2006. Longer extract and other reviews can be found on this page.
2. ^ 'The Progress of Hart Crane,' Poetry 36 (June 1930) pp. 153-65
3. ^ Haw, Richard. The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History (2005) p.175
4. ^ Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tenessee Williams (1997) p. 9-10
5. ^ Poets Bookshelf p. 126

See also

• Walt Whitman (a hero to Crane)
• Yvor Winters (a friend and critic of Crane)
• Harold Bloom (literary critic inspired by Crane)
• Tennessee Williams (inspired by Crane)
• Modernist poetry in English
• Poetry of the United States

Walter Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. ... Arthur Yvor Winters (October 17, 1900 - January 26, 1968) was an American literary critic and poet, noted as a critic of poetry and embroiled in controversy. ... Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American professor and prominent literary and cultural critic. ... Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), better known by the pseudonym Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright and one of the prominent playwrights of the twentieth century. ... a poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which brought him to prominence. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Hart Crane

• Modern American Poetry: Hart Crane (1899-1932)
• Litkicks article
• Spanish Translations of Hart Crane by Raùl Racedo, Argentina
• A recitation of Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge, with commentary and poetic paraphrase at Innerlea.com