Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet.


Crane was gay. He 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 social pariah.

    

This
is the ninety-fifth  post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of history.

Finding
both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane
wrote modernist poetry that is difficult, highly stylized, and very
ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane
sought to write an epic poem in the vein of The Waste Land that
expressed something more sincere and optimistic than the ironic despair
that Crane found in Eliot's poetry. In the years following his death at
the age of 32, Crane has come to be seen as one of the most influential
poets of his generation.

Life and work

Hart
Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio. His 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 just before the
candy became popular. Crane’s mother and father were constantly
fighting, and early in April, 1917, 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.



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 mariner.

"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.

His
only heterosexual relationship - with Peggy Cowley, the soon to be
ex-wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley, who joined Crane in the south when
the Cowleys agreed to divorce - began 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 in spite of his relationship with Cowley. Just before noon on
27 April 1932, while onboard the steamship SS Orizaba heading back to
New York from Mexico - right after he was beaten for making sexual
advances to a male crew member, 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.

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".

Most
serious work on Crane begins with his letters, selections of which are
available in many editions of his poetry; his letters to Munson, Tate,
Winters, and his patron, Otto Hermann Kahn, have been particularly
valuable. Even his two most famous stylistic defenses emerged from
correspondences: his Emersonian "General Aims and Theories" (1925) was
written to urge Eugene O’Neill’s critical foreword to White Buildings,
then passed around among friends, yet unpublished during Crane's life;
and the famous "Letter to Harriet Monroe" (1926) was part of an exchange
for the publication of "At Melville's Tomb" in Poetry.

Difficulty

The
publication of White Buildings was delayed by Eugene O'Neill's struggle
(and eventual failure) to articulate his appreciation for a foreword to
it; and many critics since have used Crane's difficulty as an excuse
for a quick dismissal. Even a young Tennessee Williams, then falling in
love with Crane's poetry, could "hardly understand a single line--of
course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The
message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect....".

It
was not lost on Crane, then, that his poetry was difficult. Some of his
best, and practically only, essays originated as encouraging epistles:
explications and stylistic apologies to editors, updates to his patron,
and the variously well-considered or impulsive letters to his friends.
It was, for instance, only the exchange with Harriet Monroe at Poetry
when she initially refused to print "At Melville’s Tomb" that urged
Crane to describe his "logic of metaphor" in print. But describe it he
did, then complaining that:

If the poet is to be held completely
to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and
logic--what field of added consciousness and increased perceptions (the
actual province of poetry, if not lullabies) can be expected when one
has to relatively return to the alphabet every breath or two? In the
minds of people who have sensitively read, seen, and experienced a great
deal, isn’t there a terminology something like short-hand as compared
to usual description and dialectics, which the artist ought to be right
in trusting as a reasonable connective agent toward fresh concepts, more
inclusive evaluations?

Monroe was not impressed, though she
acknowledged that others were, and printed the exchange alongside the
poem: "You find me testing metaphors, and poetic concept in general, too
much by logic, whereas I find you pushing logic to the limit in a
painfully intellectual search for emotion, for poetic motive." In any
case, Crane had a relatively well-developed rhetoric for the defense of
his poems.

More recently, Allen Grossman has given a much
respected guest lecture at the University of Chicago, "On communicative
difficulty in general and 'difficult' poetry in particular: the example
of Hart Crane's The Broken Tower."

The "Homosexual Text"

Recent
queer criticism has pointed out that it is particularly difficult,
perhaps even inappropriate, to read many of Crane's poems - "The Broken
Tower," "My Grandmother’s Love Letters," the "Voyages" series, and so on
- without a willingness to look for, and uncover, homosexual meanings
in the text. Tim Dean argues, for instance, that the obscurity of
Crane's style owes itself 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, arguing from a more essentialist
viewpoint, articulates yet another problem with 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."[16] Even more than a personal or political problem, though,
Yingling argues that such biases obscure much of what the poems make
clear; see, for instance, the last lines of "My Grandmother's Love
Letters" from White Buildings, a haunting description of estrangement
from the norms of (heterosexual) family life:

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.


Influence

Crane
has long been admired among poets, often passionately so.[citation
needed] Some poet-critics have been ambivalent — one thinks of Yvor
Winters’s famous turnabout, reviewing The Bridge in Poetry — but even
the turnings-away have a tone of affectionate critique: Winters’s review
grants Crane’s status of a "poet of genius" as a matter of course, even
if he goes on to say that the poem augurs for a "public catastrophe."
Crane was admired 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 publish his work, as did T. S.
Eliot, who, moving even further out of Pound's sphere, may have borrowed
some of Crane's imagery for Four Quartets.

Over the next two
generations, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg read The Bridge together,
John Berryman wrote him one of his famous elegies, 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." Perhaps most adoringly, Tennessee Williams wanted to be "given
back to the sea" at the "point most nearly determined as the point at
which Hart Crane gave himself back.”

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 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."


Bibliography
Published by Crane
White Buildings (1926) ISBN 0-87140-179-7
The Bridge (1930) ISBN 0-87140-025-1
Compilations of Letters and/or Poems
The
Complete Poems of Hart Crane, Marc Simon, ed. New York: Liveright
(1986; Centennial edition with intro. by Harold Bloom, 2000) ISBN
978-0-87140-178-9
O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart
Crane. intro. and commentary by Langdon Hammer, forward by Paul Bowles.
New York: Four Walls Eight Windows (1997) ISBN 978-0-941423-18-2
Hart
Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters, Langdon Hammer, ed. New
York: The Library of America (2006) ISBN 978-1-931082-99-0.
Hart
Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence. Thomas Parkinson
ed. and commentary. Berkeley: University of California Press (1978)
The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, Boriswood, 1938 (First UK edition edited by Waldo Frank)