The Complete Poems

by Hart Crane, Harold Bloom, Marc Simon (Editor)

This edition features a new introduction by Harold Bloom as a centenary tribute to the visionary of White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930). Hart Crane, prodigiously gifted and tragically doom-eager, was the American peer of Shelley, Rimbaud, and Lorca. Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899, Crane died at sea on April 27, 1932, an apparent suicide. A born poet, totally devoted to his art, Crane suffered his warring parents as well as long periods of a hand-to-mouth existence. He suffered also from his honesty as a homosexual poet and lover during a period in American life unsympathetic to his sexual orientation. Despite much critical misunderstanding and neglect, in his own time and in ours, Crane achieved a superb poetic style, idiosyncratic yet central to American tradition. His visionary epic, The Bridge, is the most ambitious and accomplished long poem since Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Marc Simon's text is accepted as the most authoritative presentation of Hart Crane's work available. For this centennial edition, Harold Bloom, who was introduced to poetry by falling in love with Crane's work while still a child, has contributed a new introduction.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, American, Literature, Fiction, 20th Century, The United States Of America

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

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".

Reviews

[August · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps."

It seems to me that Hart Crane got the shaft during his lifetime and spent much of his time trying to become published, although that slowly changed. Eventually he was posthumously trumpeted by Harold Bloom as America's twentieth century answer to Walt Whitman. After spending considerable time immersed in Crane's poetry, I think I would have to agree.

My first time reading his works (8 years ago) didn't leave a big impression...I can't recall much of my original impression and just remember tossing the book on the shelf. Revisiting Hart Crane was an entirely different and memorable experience. I think it happened to seize me at the right time in my life. I hope other fellow readers are able to have a similar experience. After all, isn't that soul rattling experience what we are all after? It's why I read...for that possibility.

Just take a quick look at his poem about Melville's tomb, especially how he closed the last stanza.

At Melville's Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hart Crane is a spectacular poet. His epic writing is daunting and maybe a little bit overly referential, complexity that won't give the reader an entry into the field of meaning and emotion.

His short pieces, though, are second to none.

"Black Tambourine", "Chaplinesque", "White Buildings", "The Broken Tower" are visionary poetry that stands with that which has already been established as the exemplars of the genre as we know it.

infinitely inspirational to contemporary writing, Beat lit, Bloomian poetics, and a whole bunch of other tributaries in literature.

I only wish he'd lived long enough to have developed further as poet. His deeper manifesto of "the Logic of Metaphor" would have cut a swath so deep as to have had everybody reeling in its wake.

[Jay Sandover · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a staggering collection of poems. Bloom's Centenary Introduction is quite good.

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
*
And finally, in that memory all things nurse;

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hart Crane has always been one of my favorite poets. At his best, he fuses rich Elizabethan diction with the scientific and popular language of modernity, rejuvenating the former and ennobling the latter, and with both evoking the mysticism of his nineteenth-century forebears, Whitman and Melville. But he achieves this only sparingly. Most of his poems are overwrought, post-romantic catastrophes. Usually they are at least endearing in their badness, and therefore worth suffering to discover his great poems: "To Brooklyn Bridge," "Atlantis," "Possessions," "At Melville's Tomb." I still recommend reading Crane's work as a body because sifting through the dross enhances the encounter with his masterpieces; the sense is of discovery, not just aesthetic appreciation alone. ("Aesthetic" being about the only grounds on which to appreciate Crane's often unintelligible verse.)

[Simon Robs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man overboard! That must have been some-thing rascally deranged indeed. Was it prefigured or/and put in-to motion lead by years of reference? Séance says.. too/2 unpublished frags. for quoth ("aid (used only in first and third person singular before the subject):
"“Well, the tide is going out” quoth the sailor""

"WELL/WELL/NOT-AT-ALL

Yakka-hoola-hikki-doola
Pico-della-miran-dohhh-la
leonarda-della-itchy-vinci
es braust ein Ruf wie
DONNERHALL
pffffff ! "


" YOU ARE THAT FRAIL

You are that frail decision that devised
Their lowest common multiple of human need,
And on that bleak assumption risked the prize
Forgetfulness of all you bait for greed... "

[Andrew]

I'd read a bit of Hart Crane before, enough that I felt I should read the complete works. I feel like I understand less of Hart Crane now than I did then. This is about as willfully hermetic as poetry can be before becoming truly impenetrable (a la John Ashbery). Because each poem – or at least the best of them – really does form a cohesive whole that can't really be broken down into individual lines, by and large. Imagery and metaphor ranges from the hyper-urban to tropical blissout, and Crane took freely from both the modernist and the Elizabethan playbook. The whole thing is damn hard to pin down, but I liked it. These are things I'll be going back to from time to time.

[Jeffrey Ethan Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still one of the most heart-rending, haunting and baffling poets of the last 100 years. Someone who inspires almost despite his many quirks and obscurities. Beautiful to a point where it was definitely unhealthy, incurable and contagious.

Oddly, this is the poet Harold Bloom confessed was his own personal favorite.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Includes -

The Bridge
White Buildings
Key West
Uncollected Poems &
Early Poems.

Plus an Essay on modern poetry.

All in all, this volume contains some of Crane's best and most valued work.

[Mr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hart Crane's brilliant poetry continues in the tradition of Eliot's 'The Wasteland,' in that he is interested in exploring the modern American landscape. Crane's poetry pulsates with his passion and tragedy. Frequent themes are his own homosexuality and the coldness of contemporary existence. His work is tremendous achievement in terms of its visual beauty and lyrical flow:

"Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells."

Hart Crane lived a tragically short life. Fortunately his remarkable work remains.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crane may very well be poetry's last great romantic. Though certainly influenced by Eliot's advances in form, he rejected that poet's despair in favor of a grander, more mythic, and ultimately more affirmative vision of the world. (Ironic then, that he would die young by his own hand, while Eliot lived to be much older...). Crane's poetry is dense, soaked in language, shot through with a burning eroticism, and goverened by what he called "the logic of metaphor." Often enigmatic, labyrinthian or just plain opaque, his poetry is well worth the effort one may need to put in to appreciate it fully. And as with any great work of art, one can discover something new with every repeated reading. This is not a book that sits on your shelf collecting dust.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dangerously the summer burned
(I had joined the entrainments of the wind).

[Jake Beka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly gorgeous collection of poetry that I’m not quite sure I understand entirely. Especially some of the poems in ‘The Bridge,’ but that doesn’t take away my enjoyment of them. Hart Crane is of course an excellent stylist. His use and manipulation of language is awe-inspiring, but I think what’s more impressive about his work is how much embodied emotion is evoked and embedded in his work. I read in an American literature anthology I have that contains some of his poems that Crane was more concerned with the sensibility of his poems as opposed to having his poems understood from a conventional linguistic or rhetorical sense. I will say though, I find it hard to review the later half of the book mostly because it’s fragments and unfinished poems, but even still, the editor did an amazing job rendering them as if they were finished or supposed to be as they are presented. Hart Crane is definitely one of my favourite poets now, alongside Rimbaud and Gary Snyder.

[Mat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although The Bridge itself was more than satisfactory, not quite having had my fill of Crane's full output, I decided to dive into this, and once again was not disappointed.

This volume was published in 1933, one year after Hart Crane tragically leapt to his death in the Gulf of Mexico in 1932, and contains the majority of his poems, as far as I know. However, it is not chronological. Some dislike his fellow writer and friend Waldo Frank's Introduction but I quite liked it, although I enjoyed Malcolm Cowley's Introduction to The Bridge (Limited Editions Club) even more.

However, it is not chronological.
His major opus, The Bridge, comes first in this volume but he wrote many of the poems prior to that masterpiece. First of all, he wrote the poems that make up his first volume, White Buildings, which appear as the second major section in this volume. The poems in White Buildings appear at first sight to be no more than a collection of singular 'top picks' that Crane chose and polished down into fine diamonds over the years. However, as the scholar Alfred Hanley has pointed out, Crane carefully arranged this selection of poems so that the first half of the poems would share a common theme, the middle poem (appropriately named "Paraphrase") would serve as the pivot, and then the second half would contain the heart-wrenching transmogrifying poems of Crane's singular religious visions. If Crane had done nothing more in his life, I would still have ranked him an important poet for White Buildings alone.

Chronologically, then comes The Bridge - an utterly spectacular work of dazzling beauty. I have written about that sublime piece of 20th modernist poetry elsewhere so let's move on....

And then we come to his final 'sheaf' of poems called Key West. This contains some spectacular poems and some weaker poems that do not appear to be quite finished, which makes sense as some of these poems were written during Crane's final days in Mexico.
"O Carib Isle!" and "The Broken Tower" (possibly Crane's best poem ever) are real standouts.

Finally, at the end of this book there are some juvenilia, i.e. poems written in his youth which Crane may not have been happy to see in print as I heard he destroyed most of his early manuscripts. The last chapter in this book is an essay by Crane on the modern craft of poetry. This shows that he could write prose very well too. It's a shame that there is so little of Crane's prose in print, something which I hope will be rectified in future.

Once again, if you are interested at all in 20th century letters, especially modernism and poetry, I cannot recommend this highly enough. Eliot is good, Pound is fascinating, Joyce is head-scratchingly funny, Stein is...........well Stein, Hemingway is an enjoyable (but somewhat easily forgettable) piece-of-cake writer, but Crane truly was something special.

[Anima · Rating 5 out of 5]

To Brooklyn Bridge
'A sweeping dithyramb in which the Bridge becomes the symbol of consciousness spanning time and space
'
---Crane to Otto Kahn, March 18, 1926

'And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced
As though the sun took step of thee yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
....
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year ..."

[David S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing poet. Doing some research into his life to better understand the poetry. "The Bridge" is epic, one that I'll continue to go back to.

The introduction, by Harold Bloom, is crazy. This guy was apparently reading Crane at the age of ten. WTF. At ten I was enjoying The Hardy Boys lol. Guess it explains why Bloom teaches literature and I'm an accountant.

Great collection though.

4-1/2 melancholy stars.

Highly recommended.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crane has such an ear for sound and cadence.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's really no one else like Hart Crane at his best. In his earlier, "apprentice" work you can definitely sense the inspiration of Eliot etc, but by the time of White Buildings he's in the stratosphere doing his own thing, redefining what it means to be a language poet in the twentieth century. The old paperback copy I have is stuffed with the Post-It notes I use to flag favorite poems in my books, to where there are probably fewer I don't hold near and dear to my heart than those I do. I think many readers will probably find some of the number of unfinished fragments that close out the complete edition of his poems to be overkill (and many of them are frankly so fragmentary as to serve little purpose to anyone but scholars deeply invested in the development of Crane's incredible talent and his signature aesthetics) but to complain about their inclusion here would seem kind of like griping about the candles on a birthday cake.

[Anand · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great, recondite, allusive poet, who I will need to revisit, but I do consider him a master, even if I can’t always understand the literal sense of what he is saying. “Ave Maria,” “To Brooklyn Bridge,” “Voyages,” “The Broken Tower” are among my favorites so far.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to say how I feel about Crane: I'd never heard of him until a few days ago, and read the whole thing in two sittings. To *me*, he reads like an inferior T.S. Eliot, but that's far from consensus, and again, I only just had my first exposure to him. What appealed to me most about him was when he fell back on imagist techniques (Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle, / And a roach spans a creviced in the floor), his use of oxymoron (O Darkly Bright!, the breaking second holds, those untwisted by the love of things unreconcilable, etc.) and the cryptically suggestive lines that sound more like prophecy or the strange metaphors of mystics: "It is blood to remember; it is fire / To stammer back.../ It is God—your namelessness."

I don't know that I'd read him twice, but I'm VERY glad I read him once.

Waldo Frank's introduction, on the other hand, is an absolute mess. Skip freely.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 5 out of 5]

O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark's return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the main twains,--
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom--
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time's realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm.

Swift peal of secular light, instrinsic Myth
Whose fell unshadow is death's utter wound,--
O River-throated -- irridescently upborne
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;
With white escarpments swinging into light,
Sustained in tears the cities are endowed
And justified conclamant with ripe fields
Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.

(Atlantis, 57-72)

[Rachel]

I'm not going to rate this one because I feel like I need more time with Hart Crane. I don't know exactly why, but I just can't find passage, as a reader, into his poems. "Voyages" was lovely and parts of "The Bridge" floored me, but ultimately, I read him and reread him and feel like I'm being locked out of a very fine house.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've had this sitting around for over a year and was excited to finally read it, since all the hullaballoo. I didn't find Crane a very interesting poet. He's often described as "difficult" and whatnot, but I just don't think he's got it. I realize I'm probably in a stark minority in the world of poetry aficionados, but, there you have it.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s something odd about lauding an egalitarian modernity in inaccessible verse - ornate vocabulary, convoluted syntax, cascading images.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful collection of some of the more difficult poems I've come across.

White Buildings is my favorite collection here. I just think the slightly simpler style worked for me. At Melville's Tomb may be my new favorite poem of all time.

The Bridge was amazing as well, but the collection somehow felt less cohesive? It's an answer to Pound's Cantos apparently, but it just felt like individual poems. This is my fault of course, because I really need to delve more into the literature about this to probably understand it, but it was harder to enjoy because of that.

Key West was ok. I don't have much to say because I didn't like it all that much.

And the uncollected/unpublished/fragments were anywhere from wtf to completely mind blowing.

Either way, I loved reading him. I'll likely reread a lot of this for the rest of my life. When he's good, he seems to be one of the best.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did I skip most of the book? Yes. Pompous, multisyllabic “sense”—overwrought, overfraught—exactly the kind of “meaning” that academics love because there’s “content” to discuss. Glimmers of actual poetry in places, but mostly a deeply insecure talent intent on proving its worth.

[Typhen Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noble. Arrogant. Tragic.

A man who aimed too high, too far and yet casts a lovely light. Hart Crane is at moments utterly human, at others painfully pretentious. But as a poet, his lyricism is unmatched, his use and liberty of language destroys the conventional limits of thought, he expresses sometimes, somehow, the inexpressible... "Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream
As though a god were issue of the strings. . . ."

'The Bridge' and Hart Crane's failure... Crane's search for hope, his suicide... Despite everything, he gifts this to us:

"Here at the waters' edge the hands drop memory;
Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting lie.
How far away the star has pooled the sea —
Or shall the hands be drawn away, to die?

Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,
O Hand of Fire"

[Christian Prince · Rating 4 out of 5]

Flagrantly gorgeous lines and real perceptual insight amid fey pretension and sometimes airless erudition. Hart could look at a concrete bridge and see and dream the dizzying breadth of its majesty, and we are better for having his admiring eyes.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

The poems made a lot of archaic references which I did not understand without stopping and googling every few minutes.