Hart Crane

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.

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.

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.

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 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 - 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 27 April 1932, while onboard the steamship SS Orizaba heading back to New York from Mexico - right after he was beaten up 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".

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.

Crane has long been admired among poets, often passionately so. Some poet-critics have been ambivalent — one thinks of Yvor Winters’s famous turnabout, reviewing The Bridge in Poetry — but even the turning-aways 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." Indeed, Crane was admired, if sometimes cautiously, 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."

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