Hart Crane (1899–1932)
Author of The Complete Poems of Hart Crane
About the Author
Born in Ohio, Hart Crane's early life was filled with change and trauma. His family's many moves and his parents' divorce turned him to writing at age 13. In 1923, Crane moved to New York, where he published his first book of poetry, White Buildings, in 1926. In 1930 he published The Bridge, show more considered by most to be his best work. That same year he won the Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine; he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931. Crane's life ended in 1932 when he committed suicide by drowning. He jumped from a ship as he was returning to the United States from a trip to Mexico. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: From Wikipedia
Works by Hart Crane
The poet's vocation; selections from letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud, & Hart Crane (1967) — Contributor — 6 copies
The Complete Poems of Hart Crane - The Franklin Library - Joseph Stella Illustrations (1979) 2 copies
< Edifici bianchi > ("White buildings", U.S.A., 1926) /// < Il ponte > ("The bridge", U.S.A., 1930) 1 copy, 1 review
Eternity 1 copy
Moment Fugue 1 copy
Il ponte e altre poesie 1 copy
“Chaplinesque” 1 copy
North Labrador 1 copy
Prose and Poetry 1 copy
To Brooklyn Bridge 1 copy
Seven lyrics 1 copy
Broen 1 copy
Il ponte 1 copy
Associated Works
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000) — Contributor — 1,306 copies, 9 reviews
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost (2004) — Contributor — 1,084 copies, 3 reviews
World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time (1998) — Contributor — 458 copies, 1 review
American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume Two: E. E. Cummings to May Swenson (2000) — Contributor — 417 copies, 1 review
The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry (Southern Classics Series) (1991) — Contributor — 116 copies
The Poet's Work: 29 Poets on the Origins and Practice of Their Art (1979) — Contributor — 89 copies, 1 review
The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Concise Edition (2003) — Contributor — 68 copies, 1 review
Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007) — Contributor — 12 copies, 1 review
Sunlight on the River: Poems About Paintings, Paintings About Poems (2015) — Contributor — 10 copies, 2 reviews
A Pagan anthology composed of poems by contributors to the Pagan magazine — Contributor — 2 copies
Tennessee Williams: Die tätowierte Rose — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Crane, Harold Hart
- Birthdate
- 1899-07-21
- Date of death
- 1932-04-27
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Garrettsville, Ohio, USA
- Place of death
- Gulf of Mexico
- Cause of death
- probable suicide
- Places of residence
- Cleveland, Ohio, USA
New York, New York, USA
Paris, France
Mexico - Education
- self-educated
- Occupations
- poet
advertising manager
advertising copywriter
shipyard laborer
reporter
shipping clerk (show all 7)
salesman - Relationships
- Tate, Allen (friend)
Frank, Waldo (friend)
Munson, Gorham (friend)
Cowley, Malcolm (friend)
Winters, Yvor (friend) - Organizations
- The Fugitives
- Awards and honors
- Levinson Prize (1930)
Guggenheim fellow (1931-1932)
Members
Reviews
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 46
- Also by
- 36
- Members
- 1,772
- Popularity
- #14,530
- Rating
- 4.1
- Reviews
- 11
- ISBNs
- 50
- Languages
- 7
- Favorited
- 21
I made the mistake of reading the dreadful Harold Bloom introductory essay first. What a pile of bullshit. It was awful.
I'll give you a taste:
"Crane who suffered forever the curse of sundered parentage, never could settle on a single erotic partner, hence his quest for every sailor in his generation. But I doubt - after reading Paul Mariani, the best of Crane's biographers - that a happy domestic life, and even a steady income, would have saved Crane. No nature could have been less compromising; like a new Byron or Shelley, Crane was a Pilgrim of the Absolute. His quest for agonistic supremacy, against Eliot, to join Whitman, Dickinson, Melville in the American Pantheon. No one can read all of Crane's poetry, across sixty years as I have, [Oh, God] and miss the accents of the Sublime, of the Nietzschean quest for the foremost place.[I'm about gonna die here...] Since Crane is, in his unchurched way, a great religious poet, a Shelleyan myth-maker hymning an Alien God, the tonalities of transcendence [just shoot me] haunt The Bridge and "The Broken Tower," and even the erotic raptures and anguishes of "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" and the "Voyages."
There's another beauty but I can't bring myself to type it up. I can't help myself:
Who or what is such a "Thou" in The Bridge? Hart Crane's kind of negative transcendence represents what ought to be called the American Religion, a gnosis endemic in the United States where, for at least two centuries now, religion has been not the opiate, but the poetry of the people. Crane's actual religious heritage was his mother's Christian Science, which never affected him [Why is all this here then?]. In the spiritual exaltation of "The Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge," as in the spiritual anguish of "The Broken Tower," one can hear a mystical yearning that renders Hart Crane akin to St. John of the Cross, in sensibility though not in faith. Crane's deep attachment to William Blake's poetry, and to Emily Dickinson's, reflects his own stance as an autonomous visionary, distrustful of every creed or ideology, yet questing always for intimations of transcendence. [I just wanna puke...]
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