Hart Crane
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.
Crane was gay. As a boy, he had been seduced by an older man. 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. 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.
"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 Bridge received poor reviews by and large, but worse was Crane’s own sense of his work's failure. It was during the late '20s, while he was finishing The Bridge, that his drinking, always a problem, became 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 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".
“The game enforces smirks; but we have seenThe moon in lonely alleys makeA grail of laughter of an empty ash can,And all through the sound of gaiety and questHave heard a kitten in the wilderness.”
“How many dawns, chill from his rippling restThe seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,Shedding white rings of tumult, building highOver the chained bay waters Liberty—Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that crossSome page of figures to be filed away;—Till elevators drop us from our day ...”
“Приспособяваме се тихо към живота,доволни и от бледите утехи,които вятърът довяваи пуска в празните ни джобове.Но още храним обич към светащом спираме пред гладно котенце на прага,готови да го приютим в протрития ръкав,да го спасим от улицата - шумна и жестока.(...)Играта е такава - кара ни да се усмихваме насила.И все пак виждаме луната, спряла над самотна уличка,да преобръща празна кофа в искряща чаша на смеха,и все пак чуваме през веселия шум и нашите стремежигласа на котенце, което вика сред пустинята.”
“O sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, / Onto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.”
“The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;And swing I know not where. Their tongues engraveMembrane through marrow, my long-scattered scoreOf broken intervals … And I, their sexton slave!”
“And so it was I entered the broken worldTo trace the visionary company of love, its voiceAn instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)But not for long to hold each desperate choice.”
“I wanted you, nameless Woman of the South,No wraith, but utterly—as still more aloneThe Southern Cross takes nightAnd lifts her girdles from her, one by one—High, cool, wide from the slowly smoldering fireOf lower heavens,— vaporous scars!Eve! Magdalene! or Mary, you?Whatever call—falls vainly on the wave.O simian Venus, homeless Eve,Unwedded, stumbling gardenless to grieveWindswept guitars on lonely decks forever;Finally to answer all within one grave!And this long wake of phosphor, iridescentFurrow of all our travel—trailed derision!Eyes crumble at its kiss. Its long-drawn spellIncites a yell. Slid on that backward visionThe mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell.I wanted you . . . The embers of the CrossClimbed by aslant and huddling aromatically.It is blood to remember; it is fireTo stammer back . . . It isGod—your namelessness. And the wash— All night the water combed you with blackInsolence. You crept out simmering, accomplished.Water rattled that stinging coil, yourRehearsed hair—docile, alas, from many arms.Yes, Eve—wraith of my unloved seed!The Cross, a phantom, buckled—dropped below the dawn.Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn.”
“Love: a burnt match skating in a urinal. ”
“Permit me voyage, love, into your hands... ”
“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.”