Hart Crane

Hart Crane (1899-1932), American lyric poet, known for his meticulous, disciplined craftsmanship and his celebration of the positive aspects of modern urban, industrial life.

Crane was born July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio. He had to live with his maternal grandmother in Cleveland from 1909 until his parents' divorce in 1916, when he quit high school and went to New York City. There he was stimulated by the literary world, but he was unable to support himself by writing. Finally, in 1921, he broke with his father, and from then on writing poetry came first. His personal life, however, was in the process of becoming a chaotic mixture of alcoholism and homosexuality.

Crane's first book, White Buildings (1926), while manifesting symbolist influence, showed him to be a strong, original poet of striking imagery and dense, free-associative metaphors. Notable poems in the collection include “Black Tambourines,””Voyages,” and “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” the latter of which was inspired, in part, by Crane's opposition to the “poetry of negation” of T. S. Eliot. Crane's greatest achievement, The Bridge (1930), which took as its central and unifying symbol the Brooklyn Bridge, was an even more explicit affirmation of modern civilization. In its complex, near-epic structure, the poet explored more deeply the theme that pervaded his work: the vital power of humanity's creative genius to reveal the links between the mythic past and the seemingly mundane present.

Crane received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931 and went to Mexico to write. He produced only one memorable poem in Mexico, “The Broken Tower,” and drank himself to the edge of insanity. Returning to New York City by boat, on April 27, 1932, he leaped overboard and presumably drowned. The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane appeared in 1966.