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Complete Poems and Selected Letters
No American poet has so swiftly and decisively transformed the course of poetry as Hart Crane. In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called "the broken world." White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane's masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot's The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day.
This edition is the largest collection of Crane's writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane's letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry. His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time.
This landmark 850-page volume features a detailed and freshly-researched chronology of Crane's life by editor Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University and a biographer of Crane, as well as extensive explanatory notes, and over fifty biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents.
864 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1968
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337 people want to read
About the author
Hart Crane
55 books170 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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July 23, 2023
Hart Crane's career in poetry was brief, and his life not much less so. Two slim volumes of difficult verse are all he produced, the latter published by Harry Crosby's infamous Black Sun Press following a short but decisive visit to Paris in 1929. Unlike Crosby, whose suicide was intended as a kind of final artistic flourish, Crane wanted his writing to stand on its own, and expected to produce much more of it. ‘I shall do my best work later on when I am about 35 or 40,’ he predicted as a young man. He wouldn't live to see either age.
I wondered, when I first flicked through this volume, whether Crane's output entirely justifies the whole Library of America treatment. His published oeuvre comprises just 74 pages of this 850-page book; there are a few more scraps of unpublished poems and some occasional magazine articles, and the rest is taken up with his selected letters.
But by the end I was convinced – or perhaps just won over by the sad trajectory of Crane's life. Born in 1899, right at the end of the nineteenth century, he grew up in Ohio in relative comfort thanks to his father's flourishing confectionery company. (Crane senior had invented, among other things, Life Saver candies.) He always had artistic inclinations, and as a teenager was already promising his parents that he could ‘really without doubt be one of the foremost poets in America’.
His folks were not exactly unsupportive, but they were parentally dubious. Much of his life was spent either resisting or succumbing (depending on cashflow) to his father's urgings to take work in the family company, and, when elsewhere, trying to convince them to loan him some money, pointing to occasional published poems in magazines as evidence of a burgeoning career of his own. For the rest of his life, he would always be short of money, accommodation and food – though not, alas, of drink.
His first collection, White Buildings, was published when he was 26 thanks to financial support from the New York banker Otto Kahn. In literary circles it made an impression, aligning Crane with the incipient modernist movement, though even its admirers did not claim to understand all of it. The poems are full of amazing collocations, unusual word choices, and strange images, even when the overall meaning is unclear.
Crane seemed surprised that people found his writing opaque, and it's clear from his letters that he was not being deliberately difficult: for him, the meanings were clear, every connotation of every word precisely calibrated. Accepting the feedback, he took Donne's line – ‘Make my dark poem light, and light’ – as a guiding principle, and tried (with, admittedly, limited success) to render his carefully worked constructions more meaningful to others.
Imagine trying to be a writer in the 1920s, when writing was being reinvented! One of Crane's friends smuggled a copy of the then-banned Ulysses out of Europe for him, and he read it with astonishment and delight late in 1922. When it came to poetry, it was all about Eliot (and for Crane, to a lesser extent, EE Cummings, whom he later came to know). ‘I was rather disappointed,’ he said, after reading The Waste Land. ‘It was good, of course, but so damned dead.’
A lot of Crane's work came to be positioned specifically against what he saw as Eliot's pessimism. ‘I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or (if must put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal,’ he wrote, in a kind of mission statement.
The result of this would be his second book, The Bridge, which I think qualifies as a work of greatness almost on ambition alone. Taking Brooklyn Bridge as an eternal symbol, the poem-sequence covers the whole historic span of America, from Columbus arriving off the coast, through Pocahontas and the pioneers, right down to a modern New York of skyscrapers and subways.
Much of this is dense and allusive in the best Crane style, though we now also get some passages of startling clarity. I especially loved this beautiful section describing early-twentieth-century railroad bums:
Here Crane seems to look ahead to the writing of the Beats – as indeed he does elsewhere, in his treatment of American music (‘Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words!’ he wrote to a friend). I looked Crane up in the index of Allen Ginsberg's essays, and sure enough he gets plenty of mentions as a key influence, especially the last and most visionary part of The Bridge, where America is elided with ‘Atlantis’.
By the time The Bridge was published in 1930, though, Crane's life was already falling apart. His letters about poetry become increasingly interspersed with letters apologising for his drunken behaviour; he was thrown out of more than one friend's house after causing a scene, travelled around rather aimlessly, spent some nights in jail. Interested primarily in men, he sometimes got in trouble propositioning prospective partners (often sailors). His mother later burned all his letters to boyfriends, though a few references remain in correspondence with friends:
Some critics have connected the obscurity of his verse to the ‘secret’ of his homosexuality, but this doesn't feel all that convincing, since he spoke about it quite openly with his acquaintances (and eventually, it seems, with his family).
The Bridge was greeted with mixed reviews, and it must have been obvious that, however much poetry he could produce, he would never make a very healthy living from it. References to drink become more and more frequent in his later letters (‘I have just had my ninth snifter of Scotch’) and his train of thought sometimes derails.
A Guggenheim fellowship in 1931 offered a last burst of funding; he used the money to set up in Mexico, where living was cheap and he could entertain thoughts of a possible verse project about Montezuma. You can tell that he's lonely. Many of his former friends have drifted away from him, either due to artistic squabbles or because he had offended them on some rum-fuelled rampage.
Even then, though, he seems to be grasping for the hopefulness that inspired his poetry. ‘I suspect that unconsciously I'm very much on the side of Life,’ he suggested, when consciously he obviously felt anything but. There is a touching, unexpected relationship with an old friend, seemingly his first female lover (‘I seem to have broken ranks with my much advertised “brotherhood”,’ he wrote ruefully), though he was unable to stop sleeping with men and hated himself for his lack of control.
When the Guggenheim money ran out, he set sail back to the US and to god knows what continued round of money-borrowing and friends' spare rooms. On the voyage, he got hammered and stampeded through the ship, eventually making advances to one of the crew and getting badly beaten up. Around noon on the morning after, he staggered to the railing, announced, ‘Goodbye, everybody,’ and threw himself into the Atlantic.
He was 32 years old and the ship was just out of Havana. I wish they had at least made it back to New York, to his visionary America and his beloved Brooklyn Bridge, to which he had offered his own kind of prayer: ‘And we have seen night lifted in thine arms’.
‘Silly of me to say so,’ he had written earlier – ‘but life can be gorgeously kindly at times.’ In the end he couldn't quite believe it, but his poetry made it true all the same.
I wondered, when I first flicked through this volume, whether Crane's output entirely justifies the whole Library of America treatment. His published oeuvre comprises just 74 pages of this 850-page book; there are a few more scraps of unpublished poems and some occasional magazine articles, and the rest is taken up with his selected letters.
But by the end I was convinced – or perhaps just won over by the sad trajectory of Crane's life. Born in 1899, right at the end of the nineteenth century, he grew up in Ohio in relative comfort thanks to his father's flourishing confectionery company. (Crane senior had invented, among other things, Life Saver candies.) He always had artistic inclinations, and as a teenager was already promising his parents that he could ‘really without doubt be one of the foremost poets in America’.
His folks were not exactly unsupportive, but they were parentally dubious. Much of his life was spent either resisting or succumbing (depending on cashflow) to his father's urgings to take work in the family company, and, when elsewhere, trying to convince them to loan him some money, pointing to occasional published poems in magazines as evidence of a burgeoning career of his own. For the rest of his life, he would always be short of money, accommodation and food – though not, alas, of drink.
His first collection, White Buildings, was published when he was 26 thanks to financial support from the New York banker Otto Kahn. In literary circles it made an impression, aligning Crane with the incipient modernist movement, though even its admirers did not claim to understand all of it. The poems are full of amazing collocations, unusual word choices, and strange images, even when the overall meaning is unclear.
Look steadily—how the wind feasts and spins
The brain's disk shivered against lust. Then watch
While darkness, like an ape's face, falls away,
And gradually white buildings answer day.
(From ‘Recitative’)
Crane seemed surprised that people found his writing opaque, and it's clear from his letters that he was not being deliberately difficult: for him, the meanings were clear, every connotation of every word precisely calibrated. Accepting the feedback, he took Donne's line – ‘Make my dark poem light, and light’ – as a guiding principle, and tried (with, admittedly, limited success) to render his carefully worked constructions more meaningful to others.
Imagine trying to be a writer in the 1920s, when writing was being reinvented! One of Crane's friends smuggled a copy of the then-banned Ulysses out of Europe for him, and he read it with astonishment and delight late in 1922. When it came to poetry, it was all about Eliot (and for Crane, to a lesser extent, EE Cummings, whom he later came to know). ‘I was rather disappointed,’ he said, after reading The Waste Land. ‘It was good, of course, but so damned dead.’
A lot of Crane's work came to be positioned specifically against what he saw as Eliot's pessimism. ‘I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or (if must put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal,’ he wrote, in a kind of mission statement.
The result of this would be his second book, The Bridge, which I think qualifies as a work of greatness almost on ambition alone. Taking Brooklyn Bridge as an eternal symbol, the poem-sequence covers the whole historic span of America, from Columbus arriving off the coast, through Pocahontas and the pioneers, right down to a modern New York of skyscrapers and subways.
Much of this is dense and allusive in the best Crane style, though we now also get some passages of startling clarity. I especially loved this beautiful section describing early-twentieth-century railroad bums:
Behind
My father's cannery works I used to see
Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery,
The ancient men—wifeless or runaway
Hobo-trekkers that forever search
An empire wilderness of freight and rails.
Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch,
Holding to childhood like some termless play.
John, Jake or Charley, hopping the slow freight
—Memphis to Tallahassee—riding the rods,
Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.
Yet they touch something like a key perhaps.
From pole to pole across the hills, the states
—They know a body under the wide rain;
Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates
With racetrack jargon,—dotting immensity
They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast
Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue—
Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west.
—As I have trod the ruinous midnights, too.
Here Crane seems to look ahead to the writing of the Beats – as indeed he does elsewhere, in his treatment of American music (‘Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words!’ he wrote to a friend). I looked Crane up in the index of Allen Ginsberg's essays, and sure enough he gets plenty of mentions as a key influence, especially the last and most visionary part of The Bridge, where America is elided with ‘Atlantis’.
By the time The Bridge was published in 1930, though, Crane's life was already falling apart. His letters about poetry become increasingly interspersed with letters apologising for his drunken behaviour; he was thrown out of more than one friend's house after causing a scene, travelled around rather aimlessly, spent some nights in jail. Interested primarily in men, he sometimes got in trouble propositioning prospective partners (often sailors). His mother later burned all his letters to boyfriends, though a few references remain in correspondence with friends:
I have been driven at last to the parks. The first night brought me a most strenuous wooing and the largest instrument I have handled. Europa and the Bull are now entirely passé.
Some critics have connected the obscurity of his verse to the ‘secret’ of his homosexuality, but this doesn't feel all that convincing, since he spoke about it quite openly with his acquaintances (and eventually, it seems, with his family).
The Bridge was greeted with mixed reviews, and it must have been obvious that, however much poetry he could produce, he would never make a very healthy living from it. References to drink become more and more frequent in his later letters (‘I have just had my ninth snifter of Scotch’) and his train of thought sometimes derails.
A Guggenheim fellowship in 1931 offered a last burst of funding; he used the money to set up in Mexico, where living was cheap and he could entertain thoughts of a possible verse project about Montezuma. You can tell that he's lonely. Many of his former friends have drifted away from him, either due to artistic squabbles or because he had offended them on some rum-fuelled rampage.
Even then, though, he seems to be grasping for the hopefulness that inspired his poetry. ‘I suspect that unconsciously I'm very much on the side of Life,’ he suggested, when consciously he obviously felt anything but. There is a touching, unexpected relationship with an old friend, seemingly his first female lover (‘I seem to have broken ranks with my much advertised “brotherhood”,’ he wrote ruefully), though he was unable to stop sleeping with men and hated himself for his lack of control.
When the Guggenheim money ran out, he set sail back to the US and to god knows what continued round of money-borrowing and friends' spare rooms. On the voyage, he got hammered and stampeded through the ship, eventually making advances to one of the crew and getting badly beaten up. Around noon on the morning after, he staggered to the railing, announced, ‘Goodbye, everybody,’ and threw himself into the Atlantic.
He was 32 years old and the ship was just out of Havana. I wish they had at least made it back to New York, to his visionary America and his beloved Brooklyn Bridge, to which he had offered his own kind of prayer: ‘And we have seen night lifted in thine arms’.
‘Silly of me to say so,’ he had written earlier – ‘but life can be gorgeously kindly at times.’ In the end he couldn't quite believe it, but his poetry made it true all the same.
April 11, 2023
A Poet Of Vision. A Life Of Excess
"Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
must lay his heart out for my bed and board."
In a short, tumultuous life, Hart Crane (1899 -- 1932) wrote two of the greatest books of 20th Century American poetry: White Buildings (1926) and the Bridge (1930) as well as some splendid individual poems. His poetry is collected in this outstanding volume of the Library of America, edited by Langdon Hammer of Yale University.
Of the 850 pages of this book, only 144 are devoted to Crane's poetry. Most of the remainder of the text consists of 14 short essays by Crane and of 412 letters from his extensive correspondence written between 1910 and his suicide in 1932. These letters, together with Professor Hammer's notes and biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents, offer the reader a good portrait of Crane's troubled life, and they read with more immediacy and poignancy than any biography.
Crane dropped out of high school and left an unhappy home in Cleveland at the age of 17 to try to make his way as a poet in New York. Many of the letters in this collection detail Crane's stormy relationship with his parents, his father Clarence ("C.A.") Crane, a wealthy chocolate manufacturer, and his mother Grace Hart Crane. Crane was also close to his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Belden Hart. In the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge, Crane said that the he had to "Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage". His difficult, shifting relationship with his family is amply chronicled in these letters.
But this collection includes much more than correspondence with a broken family. They offer insight into Crane's poetic ambitions and into the composition of The Bridge and of the shorter poems. They offer a view of New York City, seen through Crane's eyes, and of his literary friends and contemporaries, including Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Malcolm Cowley, Peggy Cowley, Crane's patron Otto Kahn, and many others. The letters give the reader a portrait of a complex, troubled person who from late adolescence lived life hard and on the edge. Crane was promiscuous with a lengthy series of mostly homosexual affairs together with longer-term relationships with men and women. Crane's most intense male relationship was with a sailor named Emil Opffer (none of his letters to Opffer survive) and, just before his death, he had a passionate heterosexual relationship in Mexico with Peggy Cowley, as she was divorcing Malcolm Cowley. From his mid-20s Crane had deep problems with alcoholism which greatly hindered his ability to write. He was perpetually short of money and cadged and borrowed extensively from his friends and family. He fought constantly and was jailed several times. In a fit of depression -- when his life superficially seemed to be looking up he committed suicide by jumping off a ship, the Orizaba, en route from Cuba to New York City.
Read as a whole, this collection of Crane's correspondence and poetry raises difficult and probably unanswerable questions about the relationship between Crane's life and his work. Crane's excesses and passions in fact are an important component of his poetry. But while the life was a failure, Crane was a poet of romantic vision. Crane struggled for years to complete "The Bridge", a work which remains controversial and not unqualifiedly successful. In this poem, Crane took the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol and tried to create a myth, in the machine age, that would unite America's past with its future and also give meaning to his own life. (Much of The Bride is autobiographical.) The Bridge is a work of difficult optimism as Crane traces America back to the voyages of Columbus and the days of Pocahontas with Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe as guides. The poems ends on a note of affirmation and hope, as The Bridge becomes a path to transcendence and to the overcoming of materialism and lifeless routine through love and brotherhood.
Crane's short poems are highly concentrated and difficult. The poems I find most rewarding in "White Buildings" include "Voyages" a six-poem sequence detailing an intense love affair and "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" which is a predecessor of "The Bridge." The shorter poems include "At Melville's Tomb", the subject of an exchange with Harriet Monroe included in this collection, and "Chaplinesque."
One of Crane's masterpieces is his final poem "The Broken Tower" which describes how "I entered the broken world/To trace the visionary company of love, its voice/An instant in the wind." The Broken Tower ends on a note on the redemptive power of love while, soon after completing the poem, Hart Crane would commit suicide.
This is a volume that will bring Hart Crane to his readers. The letters chronicle a sad life cut short by excess. But Hart Crane's poetry, brief in amount though it is, has stayed with and inspired me for many years. Hart Crane holds a high place in America's literary heritage. He deserves his place in the Library of America.
The quotation at the beginning of this review is from Robert Lowell's sonnet "Words for Hart Crane" in his collection "Life Studies".
Robin Friedman
"Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,
must lay his heart out for my bed and board."
In a short, tumultuous life, Hart Crane (1899 -- 1932) wrote two of the greatest books of 20th Century American poetry: White Buildings (1926) and the Bridge (1930) as well as some splendid individual poems. His poetry is collected in this outstanding volume of the Library of America, edited by Langdon Hammer of Yale University.
Of the 850 pages of this book, only 144 are devoted to Crane's poetry. Most of the remainder of the text consists of 14 short essays by Crane and of 412 letters from his extensive correspondence written between 1910 and his suicide in 1932. These letters, together with Professor Hammer's notes and biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents, offer the reader a good portrait of Crane's troubled life, and they read with more immediacy and poignancy than any biography.
Crane dropped out of high school and left an unhappy home in Cleveland at the age of 17 to try to make his way as a poet in New York. Many of the letters in this collection detail Crane's stormy relationship with his parents, his father Clarence ("C.A.") Crane, a wealthy chocolate manufacturer, and his mother Grace Hart Crane. Crane was also close to his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Belden Hart. In the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge, Crane said that the he had to "Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage". His difficult, shifting relationship with his family is amply chronicled in these letters.
But this collection includes much more than correspondence with a broken family. They offer insight into Crane's poetic ambitions and into the composition of The Bridge and of the shorter poems. They offer a view of New York City, seen through Crane's eyes, and of his literary friends and contemporaries, including Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Malcolm Cowley, Peggy Cowley, Crane's patron Otto Kahn, and many others. The letters give the reader a portrait of a complex, troubled person who from late adolescence lived life hard and on the edge. Crane was promiscuous with a lengthy series of mostly homosexual affairs together with longer-term relationships with men and women. Crane's most intense male relationship was with a sailor named Emil Opffer (none of his letters to Opffer survive) and, just before his death, he had a passionate heterosexual relationship in Mexico with Peggy Cowley, as she was divorcing Malcolm Cowley. From his mid-20s Crane had deep problems with alcoholism which greatly hindered his ability to write. He was perpetually short of money and cadged and borrowed extensively from his friends and family. He fought constantly and was jailed several times. In a fit of depression -- when his life superficially seemed to be looking up he committed suicide by jumping off a ship, the Orizaba, en route from Cuba to New York City.
Read as a whole, this collection of Crane's correspondence and poetry raises difficult and probably unanswerable questions about the relationship between Crane's life and his work. Crane's excesses and passions in fact are an important component of his poetry. But while the life was a failure, Crane was a poet of romantic vision. Crane struggled for years to complete "The Bridge", a work which remains controversial and not unqualifiedly successful. In this poem, Crane took the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol and tried to create a myth, in the machine age, that would unite America's past with its future and also give meaning to his own life. (Much of The Bride is autobiographical.) The Bridge is a work of difficult optimism as Crane traces America back to the voyages of Columbus and the days of Pocahontas with Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe as guides. The poems ends on a note of affirmation and hope, as The Bridge becomes a path to transcendence and to the overcoming of materialism and lifeless routine through love and brotherhood.
Crane's short poems are highly concentrated and difficult. The poems I find most rewarding in "White Buildings" include "Voyages" a six-poem sequence detailing an intense love affair and "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" which is a predecessor of "The Bridge." The shorter poems include "At Melville's Tomb", the subject of an exchange with Harriet Monroe included in this collection, and "Chaplinesque."
One of Crane's masterpieces is his final poem "The Broken Tower" which describes how "I entered the broken world/To trace the visionary company of love, its voice/An instant in the wind." The Broken Tower ends on a note on the redemptive power of love while, soon after completing the poem, Hart Crane would commit suicide.
This is a volume that will bring Hart Crane to his readers. The letters chronicle a sad life cut short by excess. But Hart Crane's poetry, brief in amount though it is, has stayed with and inspired me for many years. Hart Crane holds a high place in America's literary heritage. He deserves his place in the Library of America.
The quotation at the beginning of this review is from Robert Lowell's sonnet "Words for Hart Crane" in his collection "Life Studies".
Robin Friedman
April 7, 2017
And so she comes to dream herself the tree, / the wind possessing her, weaving her young veins, / holding her to the sky and its quick blue, drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight. She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope / beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
To be completely honest, I'd never heard of this poet until about a week ago. A lot of his poetry is so beautiful, but I didn't care much for the letters etc that followed the poetry. Still, he's worth checking out
3.5 stars
To be completely honest, I'd never heard of this poet until about a week ago. A lot of his poetry is so beautiful, but I didn't care much for the letters etc that followed the poetry. Still, he's worth checking out
3.5 stars
August 3, 2017
Crane has an esoteric and idiosyncratic style that combatively resists paraphrase. His word collages connote, imply, suggest but rarely tell. As Crane wrote to Harriet Monroe:
“… [A]s a poet, I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and the perceptions involved in the poem.”
This approach creates at times a rough yet musical verse, reminding me a Gerard Manley Hopkins in that he piles word on word in jagged rhythms. The word play is notable and, at its best, oddly beautiful without being affectatious. But this is a difficult to successfully maintain, and one is always walking the tightrope risking going so far he or she loses the reader.
Although Crane argued for the democratic nature of his style – we’re all capable of feeling the connotations of words – his work is more often than not obscure and esoteric. For me, the language holds together for a while but the connotations/metaphors eventually become so varied and stretched so far that the idea/feeling loses the center of gravity holding it together and it disintegrates into a word salad. In the end, most of his poetry becomes a secret language that needs to be decoded and unpacked by literary types a la The Waste Land and The Cantos and Ulysses.
All good writing and poetry have their “so-called illogical impingements.” But they also have straightforward telling. (I won’t say meaning.) It’s possible to have both. The question is how much of either you want as a writer or reader. Crane, for me, goes too far for me to consider his poems “successful.”
The Bridge ** – In about 40 pages, Crane tries to capture the genius of America and retell the history of the continent. He certainly has ambition. He doesn’t succeed.
The theme is diffuse, and if the theme were not tenuous enough, the language unravels and it all falls rather flat. The center is missing. Is this the journey of one person? Or a nation? Maybe it’s both. Whichever way you choose to read this, the haphazard structure, capricious episodes and overwrought language supports neither. It needs to be either much longer or much shorter.
While it seems that Crane agrees with most of early twentieth century Modern poets that Western Civilization was a sterile, debauched mess, he professes to be optimistic that some kind of epiphany is possible. Strangely, he cites Whitman. Whitman loved the loud chugging of a factory city, the varieties of people, the common lot, democracy and even the suffering of the people. He needed no complicated myth/fantasy to unravel the spirituality of the world. He looked around. He saw and accepted the good and the bad of the world equally. Crane seems to miss that entirely.
This poem frustrated me in so many ways:
• The connotative language doesn’t hold together. As noted above, it simply breaks apart into a word salad in many places.
• I don’t like the way he suddenly drops into 16th century thee and thou. It just seems out of place and capricious in use.
• I’m not comfortable with his portrayal of women, African Americans or Native Americans. In his strange attempts to idealize them, it seems to me he demeans their real strengths and complexities.
• I find the idealization of Native American culture as some kind of Edenic/natural paradise also rather annoying (and clichéd). Again, this over-simplified fantasy betrays the depths and varieties of the pre-Columbus Native American cultures.
His unusual, overwrought, connotative language does create some beautiful lines:
Blind fists of nothing, humpty dumpty clods (p 42) [no idea what this means]
And few evade full measure of their fate (44)
Taut motors surge, space-gnawing, into flight (48) [describing the Wright Brothers’ first flight]
It also produces some baffling phrases:
… rumorous nights (43)
… in time’s despite (44)
… catch the trout’s moon whisper (46)
… clusterous sheen (59)
… occult snows (59)
I read The Bridge years ago, and it left me cold. I thought maybe I missed something so I read it again. I hadn’t missed anything. Crane said this would be either a great success or a great failure. Its failure is great – and I mean that as a compliment. This is not a great failure of fear, it is a fearless failure. I give him a lot of credit for that.
“… [A]s a poet, I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and the perceptions involved in the poem.”
This approach creates at times a rough yet musical verse, reminding me a Gerard Manley Hopkins in that he piles word on word in jagged rhythms. The word play is notable and, at its best, oddly beautiful without being affectatious. But this is a difficult to successfully maintain, and one is always walking the tightrope risking going so far he or she loses the reader.
Although Crane argued for the democratic nature of his style – we’re all capable of feeling the connotations of words – his work is more often than not obscure and esoteric. For me, the language holds together for a while but the connotations/metaphors eventually become so varied and stretched so far that the idea/feeling loses the center of gravity holding it together and it disintegrates into a word salad. In the end, most of his poetry becomes a secret language that needs to be decoded and unpacked by literary types a la The Waste Land and The Cantos and Ulysses.
All good writing and poetry have their “so-called illogical impingements.” But they also have straightforward telling. (I won’t say meaning.) It’s possible to have both. The question is how much of either you want as a writer or reader. Crane, for me, goes too far for me to consider his poems “successful.”
The Bridge ** – In about 40 pages, Crane tries to capture the genius of America and retell the history of the continent. He certainly has ambition. He doesn’t succeed.
The theme is diffuse, and if the theme were not tenuous enough, the language unravels and it all falls rather flat. The center is missing. Is this the journey of one person? Or a nation? Maybe it’s both. Whichever way you choose to read this, the haphazard structure, capricious episodes and overwrought language supports neither. It needs to be either much longer or much shorter.
While it seems that Crane agrees with most of early twentieth century Modern poets that Western Civilization was a sterile, debauched mess, he professes to be optimistic that some kind of epiphany is possible. Strangely, he cites Whitman. Whitman loved the loud chugging of a factory city, the varieties of people, the common lot, democracy and even the suffering of the people. He needed no complicated myth/fantasy to unravel the spirituality of the world. He looked around. He saw and accepted the good and the bad of the world equally. Crane seems to miss that entirely.
This poem frustrated me in so many ways:
• The connotative language doesn’t hold together. As noted above, it simply breaks apart into a word salad in many places.
• I don’t like the way he suddenly drops into 16th century thee and thou. It just seems out of place and capricious in use.
• I’m not comfortable with his portrayal of women, African Americans or Native Americans. In his strange attempts to idealize them, it seems to me he demeans their real strengths and complexities.
• I find the idealization of Native American culture as some kind of Edenic/natural paradise also rather annoying (and clichéd). Again, this over-simplified fantasy betrays the depths and varieties of the pre-Columbus Native American cultures.
His unusual, overwrought, connotative language does create some beautiful lines:
Blind fists of nothing, humpty dumpty clods (p 42) [no idea what this means]
And few evade full measure of their fate (44)
Taut motors surge, space-gnawing, into flight (48) [describing the Wright Brothers’ first flight]
It also produces some baffling phrases:
… rumorous nights (43)
… in time’s despite (44)
… catch the trout’s moon whisper (46)
… clusterous sheen (59)
… occult snows (59)
I read The Bridge years ago, and it left me cold. I thought maybe I missed something so I read it again. I hadn’t missed anything. Crane said this would be either a great success or a great failure. Its failure is great – and I mean that as a compliment. This is not a great failure of fear, it is a fearless failure. I give him a lot of credit for that.
February 9, 2024
another great completionist effort from LoA, one of my favorite publishers, a totally decent bunch of people who don't miss too often. i'd heard of hart crane, but kinda thought him related to stephen crane, all about open boats and wars he didn't fight in and doing the joseph conrad thing except in his native tongue. nope, not at all! he brings in all the techniques (well, some) of High Modernism, but in a Romantic manner. if you've heard of The Bridge, it's his "optimistic response to The Waste Land" and without a doubt the biggest turd in the collection. you're not gonna beat Eliot at Waste Landing; go respond to The Cocktail Party or that cat book which was actually Theresa Smoove Eliot, his former business partner's incarcerated idiot niece, but somehow got out under his name.
February 17, 2023
the edition (oup) i read only 302pp. though clearly major, its hard w/o the cultural/historical context to appreciate his importance. i was trying to avoid the phrase 'as an australian'.
August 3, 2011
What made Hart Crane an enormous poet was not a massive output of lines (he published only two volumes of poetry in his terribly short life), but rather it was his ability to fuse the dilemmas of modern man with a superbly stylized classical approach. Though his work was often thematically similar to that of American modernist poets like Eliot, Pound, Williams, etc., he set himself apart from these contemporaries through his superior facility for metrical and lyrical grace. Where countless modernists of the 1920’s would often deal in obscure imagery seemingly only for obscurity’s sake, one always has the sense with Crane that his aims were more rigidly defined. On the other hand, his poems were never axiomatic in nature, prudently shunning truisms and continuously indicating that which is indisputable through the use of solicitous metaphor.
Crane was a devoted letter writer, and often sought to explicate his intentions when their purpose or execution was questioned. Many artists throughout history have grown belligerent at the first sign that their labor is being scrutinized, or even analyzed. Crane, however, would respond cogently to any detractor, not so much in an effort to vindicate his own work, but to defend the very form of poetry itself. Said Crane, “I know that I run the risk of much criticism by defending such theories as I have, but as it is part of a poet’s business to risk not only criticism—but folly—in the conquest of consciousness I can only say that I attach no intrinsic value to what means I use beyond their practical service in giving form to the living stuff of the imagination.”
Crane was a devoted letter writer, and often sought to explicate his intentions when their purpose or execution was questioned. Many artists throughout history have grown belligerent at the first sign that their labor is being scrutinized, or even analyzed. Crane, however, would respond cogently to any detractor, not so much in an effort to vindicate his own work, but to defend the very form of poetry itself. Said Crane, “I know that I run the risk of much criticism by defending such theories as I have, but as it is part of a poet’s business to risk not only criticism—but folly—in the conquest of consciousness I can only say that I attach no intrinsic value to what means I use beyond their practical service in giving form to the living stuff of the imagination.”
August 28, 2008
Caveat lector: most of these letters just suck. They range from soused trivial logorrhea to careful epistles designed to impress his biographers (you should back slowly away when the letter is addressed to Yvor Winters). Sure, Hart Crane offed himself early, but Keats he ain't. The one astonishing exception is his letter to "Aunt" Harriet Monroe -- editor of Poetry -- where he explicates "At Melville's Tomb" for her tinny Edwardian ears. This is a rare example of a confident verse-spinner convincingly attacking an editor for accusing them of being -- for lack of a better term -- a wank artist.
I should also mention that Crane's "Unpublished Poems & Fragments" collected here are fascinating, but often a teensy bit embarrassing. For example, a poem called "What Nots?" begins as follows: "What is a What Not / if what is not negates / what is not what / you though it was?" Many others are worse.
Still, his unpublished, fragmentary attempt to mock e.e. cummings ("OF AN EVENING PULLING OFF A LITTLE EXPERIENCE" it's called) is worth a read: "while blundering fumbiguts gather accu / rate little, O-SO masturbations in/ to / fractions of heaven. Hold tight bless / worms trilling rimple flock to / sad iron..."
The published poems are here too, and they shall ignite you. Five stars for those.
I should also mention that Crane's "Unpublished Poems & Fragments" collected here are fascinating, but often a teensy bit embarrassing. For example, a poem called "What Nots?" begins as follows: "What is a What Not / if what is not negates / what is not what / you though it was?" Many others are worse.
Still, his unpublished, fragmentary attempt to mock e.e. cummings ("OF AN EVENING PULLING OFF A LITTLE EXPERIENCE" it's called) is worth a read: "while blundering fumbiguts gather accu / rate little, O-SO masturbations in/ to / fractions of heaven. Hold tight bless / worms trilling rimple flock to / sad iron..."
The published poems are here too, and they shall ignite you. Five stars for those.
May 27, 2013
In the book HEART CRANE, a collection of poems of selected letters, the language and word choice bring tremendous strength to the writing. Each of the poems incorporate many of the same themes, each poem is balanced both with imagery and setting, describing the scene to it fullest. The writing also makes a unique balance of the images of spirituality as well as the physical world we live in. At times the writing combines spirituality and Physical life forming almost a "divine" image in the readers mind. I can highly recommend this collection to readers of poetry as well as spiritual poetry. Many of the images enhanced through the writing are motivating as well as inspirational.This book is a calming and soothing book to any reader who wants to relax or find a place of peace away from their everyday lives.
August 17, 2012
I read this just for "Key West," Crane's unreleased book, and some of the other uncollected poems. Five stars for The Bridge, White Buildings, and Key West, the quality of the rest varies widely. Still this is a must for Crane die-hards like me who have only been able to get their hands on the two major books released during his lifetime
Currently reading
April 22, 2008I'm going to leave this in the currently-reading list, even though I put it on the street a few months ago, half read. I gave up. I'll finish it if it turns up again of if it seems to be really mysteriously important for me to finish it.
January 10, 2008
Here are housed finished monuments more lasting than bronze and loftier than the pyramid's royal pile. No furious north wind an knock these down.
July 12, 2022
Acquired 1996
Used bookstore in Montreal, Quebec
Used bookstore in Montreal, Quebec
October 31, 2013
A comprehensive volume of one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century.
January 29, 2008
My fave.
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