Crane photographed by Walker Evans, c. 1929–1930
Harold Hart Crane was an American poet. Inspired by the Romantics and his fellow Modernists, Crane wrote highly stylized poetry, often noted for its complexity. Wikipedia
Born July 21, 1899, Garrettsville, OH
Died April 27, 1932 (age 32 years), Gulf of Mexico
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.[1]
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”.[1] His last work, “The Broken Tower” (1932), was unfinished and published posthumously. Crane has been praised by several playwrights, poets, and literary critics, including Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Bloom; Bloom called him “a High Romantic in the era of High Modernism”.[2][3][4] 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.”[1]
Life
Early life
Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899 to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. His father was a successful Ohio restaurateur[5] and businessman who invented the Life Savers candy and held the patent, but sold it for $2,900 before the brand became popular.[6] He made other candy and accumulated a fortune from the business with chocolate bars. Clarence Crane’s sister, Alice Crane Williams, was a composer and literary editor.[7] His aunt Zell Hart Deming gave funds to her nephew to support his early career.[8]
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.[9]: 61, 63
Hart Crane began attending East High School around 1913–1914.[5][9]: 63 [note 1]
Career
He has woven rose-vines
About the empty heart of night,
And vented his long mellowed wines
Of dreaming on the desert white
With searing sophistry.
And he tented with far truths he would form
The transient bosoms from the thorny tree.
O Materna! to enrich thy gold head
And wavering shoulders with a new light shed
From penitence, must needs bring pain,
And with it song of minor, broken strain.
But you who hear the lamp whisper thru night
Can trace paths tear-wet, and forget all blight.
— Hart Crane’s “C33” as published in Bruno’s Weekly in 1917.[10]: 28
Crane’s first published work was the poem “C33”, which was published in the Greenwich journal Bruno’s Weekly in 1917[11]: 75 in a feature entitled “Oscar Wilde: Poems in His Praise”.[10]: 22 The poem is named after Oscar Wilde’s cell in The Ballad of Reading Gaol[5] and his name appeared misspelled in print as “Harold H Crone”.[10]: 27 The style he would use in his later books is apparent in poems written at the time.[12][13] Crane dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year[6] in December 1916[9] and left for New York City, promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University. His parents, in the middle of divorce proceedings, were upset. Crane took various copywriting jobs and moved between friends’ apartments in Manhattan.[6] For a period, he rented a room at 25 East 11th Street from a motion-picture scriptwriter named Mrs. Walton, who encouraged his writing.[14] Crane’s mother and father were constantly fighting, and they divorced on April 14, 1917.[15][note 2] The same year, he attempted to enlist in the military, but was rejected due to being a minor.[16]
He worked in a munitions plant until the end of World War I.[16] Between 1917 and 1924, he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland,[5] working as an advertising copywriter[17] and a worker in his father’s factory.[18] 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.[19] 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…[6]
Based on Crane’s letters, New York was where he felt most at home. Additionally, much of his poetry takes place there.[20]
White Buildings (1926)
Main articles: White Buildings and Voyages
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.[citation needed] 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.[5] White Buildings contains many of Crane’s most well-received and popular poems, including “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”, and “Voyages”, a sequence of erotic poems. They were written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer,[21] a Danish merchant mariner,[22] whom “Voyages” is generally considered to be about.[5] “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”,[23] an impasse,[24] and characterized by a refusal to see “certain spiritual events and possibilities”.[25] 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”.[26] 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.”[1]
Crane returned to New York in 1928 following a hurricane which left the Cuban residence damaged,[5] and began living with friends and taking temporary jobs as a copywriter, or living off unemployment and the charity of friends and his father. For a time he lived in Brooklyn at 77 Willow Street[27] 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)
Main article: The Bridge
The first known mention of The Bridge was in a 1923 letter to Gorham Munson in which he wrote:
I am ruminating on a new longish poem under the title of The Bridge which carries on further the tendencies manifest in ‘F and H.’ It will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish it as I see it now, so much time will be wasted in thinking about it.[5]
Crane moved to Paterson, New Jersey, in 1927. In 1928, he worked as a secretary for a stockbroker visiting California.[11]: 77 Crane’s mother, following her second marriage breakup, was living in the Los Angeles area. He revealed his homosexuality to her, causing a confrontation. Crane sneaked out on May 15, 1928, never to see her again. He later found out about the death of his grandmother, Elizabeth Hart, but his mother refused to pay him his $5,000 inheritance until he would return to live with her. He managed to convince her to send him the money and left for Europe towards late November[5] intending to live in Mallorca, but instead went first to London then to Paris.[5] In Paris in February 1929, Harry Crosby, who with his wife Caresse Crosby owned the fine arts press Black Sun Press, offered Crane the use of their country retreat, Le Moulin du Soleil in Ermenonville. They hoped he could use the time to concentrate on completing The Bridge. Crane spent several weeks at their estate where he wrote a draft of the “Cape Hatteras” section, a key part of his panegyric poem.[28] In late June that year, Crane returned from the south of France to Paris. Crosby noted in his journal, “Hart C. back from Marseilles where he slept with his thirty sailors and he began again to drink Cutty Sark.” Crane got drunk at the Cafe Select and fought with waiters over his tab. When the Paris police were called, he fought with them and was beaten. They arrested and jailed him, fining him 800 francs.[6] After Hart had spent six days in prison at La Santé, Crosby paid Crane’s fine and advanced him money for the passage back to the United States,[28] where he finished The Bridge.[6] In January 1930, the work was published by Black Sun Press in Paris and subsequently by Boni & Liveright in the United States in April.[5] The work received poor reviews, and Crane struggled with a sense of failure.[16]
His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge, intended to be an uplifting counter to Eliot’s The Waste Land. The Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.[16] Crane found a place to start his synthesis in Brooklyn. Arts patron Otto H. Kahn gifted him $2,000 to begin work on the panegyric poem,[6] though he had requested a loan of $1,000.[5] After parting with the Opffers, Crane left for Paris in early 1929, but continued to struggle with his mental health.[6] His drinking had become worse during the late 1920s, while he was finishing The Bridge.[29]
