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The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose
The most complete and authoritative collection of the works of Hart Crane ever published.
319 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1966
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118 people want to read
About the author
Hart Crane
52 books171 followersHart 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".
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".
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 22, 2011
I reread this in conjunction with reading the Clive Fisher biography of Crane. The Bridge, his long poem published in 1930, has always been a favorite of mine. Of this Complete Poems I read only it and his first volume of poetry, White Buildings.
Crane is a difficult poet. That said, his poetry is still wonderful to read, first because it's fun, but also because you feel as though you're reading a significantly major work, as you are with The Bridge. Because it's a demanding work and because it's one most of us will never fully assimilate, you as reader become part of the poem's quest for the transcendence suggested in the final section, "Atlantis." At the very least the reader will marvel at the beauty of Crane's poetry. And will probably come to feel there's truth in it as well.
As the Brooklyn Bridge becomes all the symbols Crane assigned it--a ship, a woman, a huge harp vaulting the continent--you're taken through history from the moment of discovery by Columbus to the present. But what I most like about it--and other works like this--is that the questions raised by such rhapsodic work as this, as we're told Crane apparently knew, are more important than the answers. In that way The Bridge urges the reader as quester on and on, always seeking more boundaries and challenges. By reading we become aware that even though there's a hellish subway tunnel, the world also contains, arcing over that tunnel beneath the East River, the promised affirmation of Brooklyn Bridge.
Tinged as he sometimes was by T. S. Eliot, Crane was nevertheless an American original with a unique voice and way of seeing the truth in America, and he should be read more often than he is.
Crane is a difficult poet. That said, his poetry is still wonderful to read, first because it's fun, but also because you feel as though you're reading a significantly major work, as you are with The Bridge. Because it's a demanding work and because it's one most of us will never fully assimilate, you as reader become part of the poem's quest for the transcendence suggested in the final section, "Atlantis." At the very least the reader will marvel at the beauty of Crane's poetry. And will probably come to feel there's truth in it as well.
As the Brooklyn Bridge becomes all the symbols Crane assigned it--a ship, a woman, a huge harp vaulting the continent--you're taken through history from the moment of discovery by Columbus to the present. But what I most like about it--and other works like this--is that the questions raised by such rhapsodic work as this, as we're told Crane apparently knew, are more important than the answers. In that way The Bridge urges the reader as quester on and on, always seeking more boundaries and challenges. By reading we become aware that even though there's a hellish subway tunnel, the world also contains, arcing over that tunnel beneath the East River, the promised affirmation of Brooklyn Bridge.
Tinged as he sometimes was by T. S. Eliot, Crane was nevertheless an American original with a unique voice and way of seeing the truth in America, and he should be read more often than he is.
April 16, 2013
I took my time with this book, putting it down, picking it up ... carrying it with me as I went about my day hoping to steal a moment of focused reading. I loved this book. I found I enjoyed The Bridge however I understood it better after reading Crane's letter about the poem later in the book. I was delighted to read the collection of early poems because they reminded me of why I first fell in love with this poet's work and in hindsight I can see how much it inspired my own early work. I am less a fan of his later poems than I am of his early poems. I liked seeing the progression of work. And I really liked having a small collection of his letters to read at the end of the book - it added some sense of who this man was, and it only fanned the flame of interest I have in this poet. So now I'm looking for other books about him or by him to read. Not sure why, but I'm completely captivated by him. I was surprised in reading his letters that he admired work by some others I like equally well. While it wasn't an easy book to digest, I certainly enjoyed working through it at my own pace.
April 26, 2023
I was ready to say this was total crap but the third collection Key West is amazing. At Melville’s Tomb is the only hit from the earlier ones. Guess the guy died right as he figured out how to write a poem. Best line is from The Mango Tree
Up jug to musical hanging jug just gay spiders yoked you first, — silking of shadows good under-drawers for owls.
I’m astounded the The Bridge seems to be the well-respected collection it really sucks. Refer to my unified theory of politics and aesthetics for further explanation but it completely fails as a supposed response to The Waste Land or whatever. Just the most vapid boring glory to the settler colony dreck. Also fails in the comparison to the goat gerard manley Hopkins by not sounding good. But the Key West collection manages that part.
Up jug to musical hanging jug just gay spiders yoked you first, — silking of shadows good under-drawers for owls.
I’m astounded the The Bridge seems to be the well-respected collection it really sucks. Refer to my unified theory of politics and aesthetics for further explanation but it completely fails as a supposed response to The Waste Land or whatever. Just the most vapid boring glory to the settler colony dreck. Also fails in the comparison to the goat gerard manley Hopkins by not sounding good. But the Key West collection manages that part.
May 15, 2024
My first reading date here in my copy of this book is 1971, and there are 5 more years of reading until 2024. I have lived with this book. I went long periods where I felt excluded from these poems -- I think primarily because of the language, the texture of Crane's choices. But I think I also didn't understand Crane's reliance on symbolism, despite all the time I've spent with French poetry. And then the associative leaps Crane makes between his symbols. I had to learn that.
And then there is the ambition. "The Bridge" goes after all the marbles -- he is putting all of American history into a pattern, a structure that allows his personal symbology to assume meaning. Without any blinders, he is assuming the mission of Whitman, he is finding possibility in the American experiment, not despite industrialism -- the building of the Bridge -- but because of that.
There are similar examples of this kind of reach in the smaller poems too. All the way through. But the one that blew me away in this reading was the very last poem Crane wrote, "The Broken Tower," and these lines
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind.
(The letters and the short critical pieces included are very helpful interpretive tools, and they remain relevant for much of contemporary poetry)
And then there is the ambition. "The Bridge" goes after all the marbles -- he is putting all of American history into a pattern, a structure that allows his personal symbology to assume meaning. Without any blinders, he is assuming the mission of Whitman, he is finding possibility in the American experiment, not despite industrialism -- the building of the Bridge -- but because of that.
There are similar examples of this kind of reach in the smaller poems too. All the way through. But the one that blew me away in this reading was the very last poem Crane wrote, "The Broken Tower," and these lines
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind.
(The letters and the short critical pieces included are very helpful interpretive tools, and they remain relevant for much of contemporary poetry)
July 31, 2022
When I read poetry, I like to read it aloud because I don’t understand it otherwise.
February 23, 2023
Some of these used to have a physical effect on me: adrenaline, hope, envy.
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November 17, 2010"the bridge" & "faustus and helen" are beautiful compositions of erudite jazz--cf. coltrane's "countdown." whitman might have sounded like this with a bit of learning and self-control.
his 4-page essay "Modern Poetry" is astounding and still applies today. part of my personal canon.
his 4-page essay "Modern Poetry" is astounding and still applies today. part of my personal canon.
December 31, 2012
I really liked most of The Bridge and will read it again at some point, and some of the reviews and letters were interesting, but overall this was a bit of a slog.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews