Hart Crane

Who2 Biography: Hart Crane, Poet

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Born: 21 July 1899
Birthplace: Garrettsville, Ohio
Died: 27 April 1932 (suicide)
Best Known As: Suicidal poet of The Bridge

Name at birth: Harold Hart Crane

Bright, volatile, short-lived and hard-drinking, Crane was in some ways an archetype of the Roaring Twenties author. Crane is best known for The Bridge (1930), an epic vision of American life with the Brooklyn Bridge as a central image. Crane is often compared to Walt Whitman, both for his modern American sensibilities and for the homoerotic imagery some find in his work. In sheer style Crane also resembled T.S. Eliot, whom he admired. Crane committed suicide by leaping from the S.S. Orizaba in 1932.

Crane was no relation to Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage.

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Biography: Hart Crane

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Hart Crane (1899-1932) was an American poet in the mystical tradition who attempted, through the visionary affirmations of his richly imagistic, metaphysically intense poetry, to counter the naturalistic despair of the 1920s.

Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, the son of the successful Cleveland manufacture of "Crane's Chocolates," and was raised in Cleveland. He violently repudiated the business values of his father and attached himself to his more cultivated mother. Crane's life was permeated with severe psychic disturbances perhaps originating in this nearly classic Oedipal situation; he eventually became an avowed homosexual and a severe alcoholic.

Apprentice Poet

In 1916 Crane went to New York, where he held odd jobs to support himself while writing poetry. Later he worked in several midwestern cities before returning to New York in the early 1920s to align himself with the literary avant-grade. Immersing himself in the study of his American literary ancestors, particularly Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, Crane also managed to become familiar with the experimental verse being published in the "little magazines" of the period and to read the latest works of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

From 1925 until the end of his life Crane received financial assistance from the New York banker and art patron Otto Kahn. Thus he was able to prepare for publication his first volume of poetry, White Buildings (1926).

Earlier, in 1922, a reading of the Tertium Organum, written by the Russian mystic P. D. Ouspensky, had affected Crane profoundly, for it provided what seemed a cogent defense of Crane's own belief in the validity of mystical knowledge based on ecstasy and direct illumination. Ouspensky used Whitman as the chief example of a modern man possessed of mystic awareness, further enhancing Crane's interest in Whitman's poetry. This interest eventually resulted in Crane's most ambitious project, The Bridge (1930), a series of closely related long poems (inspired by Whitman's example) on the transcendent meaning of the United States, in which the Brooklyn Bridge symbolized the spiritual evolution of civilization. Crane attempted to build a metaphysical "bridge" between the individual and the race, the temporal and the eternal, and the physical and the transcendent.

The tortuous spiritual affirmations of Crane's poetry, with its illumination and exaltation, represented the positive side of an intense lifelong struggle against despair and self-disgust. On April 26, 1932, after a year in Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship, Crane committed suicide by leaping into the Gulf of Mexico from the ship that was returning him to the United States. Thus the poet united himself with the sea that had so often served him as symbol of both the universal creative life-force and the threat of annihilation.

Analysis of the Writings

Allen Tate's foreword to his friend's first volume, White Buildings, remains perhaps the best brief introduction to Crane's difficult and intense poetic vision. Tate wrote: "The poetry of Hart Crane is ambitious … It is an American poetry. Crane's themes are abstractly, metaphysically conceived, but they are definitely confined to an experience of the American scene. … Crane's poems are a fresh vision of the world, so intensely personalized in a new creative language that only the strictest and most unprepossessed effort of attention can take it in. … Melville and Whitman are his avowed masters. In his sea poems … there is something of Melville's intense, transcendental brooding on the mystery of the 'high interiors of the sea.' … Crane's poetry is a concentration of certain phases of the Whitman substance, the fragments of the myth."

The best of White Buildings, "Repose of Rivers" and most of the "Voyages," are conceivably the greatest mystical poems in America since early Whitman.

Crane's "General Aims and Theories" (1926) is a rather tortured attempt to explain the terms of his mystical "way up" toward illumination and discovery through the creative adventure of art: "It is my hope to go through the combined materials of the poem, using our 'real' world somewhat as a spring-board … Its evocation will not be toward decoration or amusement, but rather toward a state of consciousness, an 'innocence' (Blake) or absolute beauty. In this condition there may be discoverable under new forms certain spiritual illuminations, shining with a morality essentialized from experience directly, and not from previous precepts or preconceptions. It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate …." [Crane's italics].

But the best illustrations of Crane's poetic aims are found in the poetry itself. These poems are notoriously difficult to paraphrase, precisely because, when Crane is most successful, the mystical experience "described" in the poetry is actually simulated for the reader in the actual reading of the poem itself. In "At Melville's Tomb" Crane moves toward the achievement of religious illuminations by what he termed the "logic of metaphor." Often, as in "The Broken Tower," a late poem, the avenue to mystic vision is paved with erotic images similar to those employed by Whitman.

Although "The Proem" to The Bridge is surely one of Crane's greatest achievements, the work as a whole is disappointing in comparison with the best of White Buildings. Attempting no less than an esthetic distillation of the "Myth of America" while plunging ever deeper into personal despair and doubt, psychic disturbance, and alcoholism, Crane was unable to realize his enormous intentions.

The intent of the book, which grew out of Crane's devotion to Whitman and his desire to refute the spiritual desolation of Eliot's Waste Land, was to provide a defense of mystical experience in the age of modern science. Ouspensky's scientifically learned book had provided Crane with an invaluable weapon in the struggle, but the indispensable ally was Whitman. At the center of The Bridge is the poem "Cape Hatteras," which Crane himself described as "a kind of ode to Whitman." Within it, Crane echoes several of Whitman's works. For both poets, science and technology do not destroy faith based on mystical awareness but enlarge and promote it.

The Achievement

But it was in "The Proem" that Crane had fully repaid his debt to Whitman. Affirmation and denial, dream and fact, in their paradoxical fusion and conflict, manage to incorporate both Whitman's vision and the materialistic temper of the 1920s that seemed to invalidate that vision. The parabolic curve of the actual bridge, which never closes in on itself, suggests the "inviolate curve" of the perfect circle of infinity and the upward movement of the spirit, while at the same time seeming to tend toward the finite closing of the arc in the intensely real steel girders of the span. The final line of the poem resolves its profound ambiguity in a plea for illumination which will "of the curveship lend a myth to God."

But Crane's attempt to demonstrate the possibility of spiritual experience in the modern wasteland through the creation of an "intrinsic," "secular" myth exacted a severe toll on the poet's already-strained psychological resources. Unable to trust completely in mystic intuitions derived largely secondhand from Whitman, and unsure of the validity of the supporting metaphysics supplied by Ouspensky but not fully corroborated in his own speculations, the poet sustained his fragile equilibrium mainly by strength of will. The excesses of Crane's personal life were probably as much the result of his tortured consciousness as of any purely clinical disorder. The failure of The Bridge to live up to its universal implications represented a collapse of will rather than a failure of the poet's art. The times were out of joint for the fulfillment of Crane's quest for transcendent certainty.

Although Crane published only two volumes of poetry in his brief career, he is regarded as one of the five or six greatest American poets of the 20th century. (Crane's Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose were published in New York in 1966.)

Hart Crane
Born	July 21, 1899(1899-07-21) Garrettsville, Ohio
Died	April 27, 1932 (aged 32) At sea: off the Florida coast
Occupation	Poet
Literary movement	American Modernism, Romanticism

Influences T. S. Eliot, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Shakespeare, E. E. Cummings, Alfred Stieglitz

Influenced Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Jasper Johns, Harold Bloom

Life and work

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^[1]. 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 and 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 pariah in relation to society. 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 for the most part, but much worse than that was Crane’s sense of failure. It was during the late '20s, while he was finishing The Bridge, that his drinking, always a problem, got 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 - occurred 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 despite his relationship with Cowley. Just before noon on 27 April 1932, while onboard the steamship SS Orizaba^[2] heading back to New York from Mexico - right after he was beaten up 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".^[3]

Poetics

Crane's critical effort - like Keats and Rilke - is most pronounced in his letters: he corresponded regularly with Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and Gorham Munson, and shared critical dialogues with Eugene O'Neill, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Burke, Waldo Frank, Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein.

Most serious work on Crane begins with his letters, selections of which are available in many editions of his poetry; his letters to Munson, Tate, Winters, and his patron, Otto Hermann Kahn, have been particularly valuable. Even his two most famous stylistic defenses emerged from correspondences: his Emersonian "General Aims and Theories" (1925) was written to urge Eugene O’Neill’s critical foreword to White Buildings, then passed around among friends, yet unpublished during Crane's life; and the famous "Letter to Harriet Monroe" (1926) was part of an exchange for the publication of "At Melville's Tomb" in Poetry.

The 'Logic of Metaphor'

As with Eliot's "objective correlative," a certain vocabulary haunts Crane criticism, his "logic of metaphor" being perhaps the most vexed. His most quoted formulation is in the circulated, if long unpublished, "General Aims and Theories":

As to technical considerations: the motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor,' which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension.^[4]

There is also some mention of it, though it is not so much presented as a critical neologism, in his letter to Harriet Monroe: "...The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explain outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology...."^[5]

L. S. Dembo's influential study of The Bridge, Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (1960), reads this 'logic' well within the familiar rhetoric of the Romantics:

The 'logic of metaphor' was simply the written form of the 'bright logic' of the imagination, the crucial sign stated, the Word made words.... As practiced, the logic of metaphor theory is reducible to a fairly simple linguistic principle: the symbolized meaning of an image takes precedence over its literal meaning; whether or not the vehicle of an image makes sense, the reader is expected to grasp its tenor.^[6]

Difficulty

The publication of White Buildings was delayed by Eugene O'Neill's struggle (and eventual failure) to articulate his appreciation for a foreword to it; and many critics since have used Crane's difficulty as an excuse for a quick dismissal.^[7] Even a young Tennessee Williams, then falling in love with Crane's poetry, could "hardly understand a single line--of course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect....".^[8]

It was not lost on Crane, then, that his poetry was difficult. Some of his best, and practically only, essays originated as encouraging epistles: explications and stylistic apologies to editors, updates to his patron, and the variously well-considered or impulsive letters to his friends. It was, for instance, only the exchange with Harriet Monroe at Poetry when she initially refused to print "At Melville’s Tomb" that urged Crane to describe his "logic of metaphor" in print.^[9] But describe it he did, then complaining that:

If the poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and logic--what field of added consciousness and increased perceptions (the actual province of poetry, if not lullabies) can be expected when one has to relatively return to the alphabet every breath or two? In the minds of people who have sensitively read, seen, and experienced a great deal, isn’t there a terminology something like short-hand as compared to usual description and dialectics, which the artist ought to be right in trusting as a reasonable connective agent toward fresh concepts, more inclusive evaluations?^[10]

Monroe was not impressed, though she acknowledged that others were, and printed the exchange alongside the poem: "You find me testing metaphors, and poetic concept in general, too much by logic, whereas I find you pushing logic to the limit in a painfully intellectual search for emotion, for poetic motive."^[11] In any case, Crane had a relatively well-developed rhetoric for the defense of his poems; here is an excerpt from "General Aims and Theories":

New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation. ...the voice of the present, if it is to be known, must be caught at the risk of speaking in idioms and circumlocutions sometimes shocking to the scholar and historians of logic. ^[12]

More recently, Allen Grossman has given a much respected guest lecture at the University of Chicago, "On communicative difficulty in general and 'difficult' poetry in particular: the example of Hart Crane's The Broken Tower."^[13]

The "Homosexual Text"

Recent queer criticism has pointed out that it is particularly difficult, perhaps even inappropriate, to read many of Crane's poems - "The Broken Tower," "My Grandmother’s Love Letters," the "Voyages" series, and so on - without a willingness to look for, and uncover, homosexual meanings in the text. Tim Dean argues, for instance, that the obscurity of Crane's style owes itself partially to the necessities of being a semi-public homosexual - not quite closeted, but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open:

The intensity responsible for Crane’s particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces a kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy.... ^[14]

Thomas Yingling, arguing from a more essentialist viewpoint, articulates yet another problem with the traditional, New Critical and Eliotic readings of Crane, arguing that the "American myth criticism and formalist readings" have "depolarized and normalized our reading of American poetry, making any homosexual readings seem perverse."^[15] Even more than a personal or political problem, though, Yingling argues that such biases obscure much of what the poems make clear; see, for instance, the last lines of "My Grandmother's Love Letters" from White Buildings, a haunting description of estrangement from the norms of (heterosexual) family life:

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

And Brian Reed, an emerging critic of Crane deeply interested in Crane's homosexuality, has made contributions to a project of critical reintegration: though sympathetic, Reed notes that an overemphasis on the sexual biography of Crane's poetry can, of course, also be damaging to a broad appreciation.^[16] He has, on a less formal scale, also contributed a study of Crane's famous gay lyrical series, "Voyages," to the Poetry Foundation.^[17]

Influence

Crane has long been admired among poets, often passionately so. Some poet-critics have been ambivalent — one thinks of Yvor Winters’s famous turnabout, reviewing The Bridge in Poetry — but even the turnings-away have a tone of affectionate critique: Winters’s review grants Crane’s status of a "poet of genius" as a matter of course, even if he goes on to say that the poem augurs for a "public catastrophe."^[18] Indeed, Crane was admired, if sometimes cautiously, by much of the Greenwich Village and New England crowd: Allen Tate and Eugene O’Neill, of course, but also Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos Williams. And though some of his sharpest critics are well known — Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and a few others — Moore did publish his work, as did T. S. Eliot, who, moving even further out of Pound's sphere, may have borrowed some of Crane's imagery for Four Quartets.^[19]

Over the next two generations, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg read The Bridge together,^[20] John Berryman wrote him one of his famous elegies, and Robert Lowell published his "Words for Hart Crane" in Life Studies (1959): "Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, / must lay his heart out for my bed and board." Perhaps most adoringly, Tennessee Williams wanted to be "given back to the sea" at the "point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back...".^[21] Also, one of Williams's last plays, a "ghost play" titled "Steps Must Be Gentle," found in Volume 6 of The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, explores Crane's relationship with his mother.

Such important affections have made Crane even more of a "poet’s poet," and much of Poet’s Bookshelf, a recent anthology of short, personal essays by contemporary poets, is marked through with debts to him. Thomas Lux offers, for instance: "If the devil came to me and said 'Tom, you can be dead and Hart can be alive,' I'd take the deal in a heartbeat if the devil promised, when arisen, Hart would have to go straight into A.A."^[22]

Beyond poetry, Crane's suicide inspired several works of art by noted artist Jasper Johns, including "Periscope" and "Diver," the "Symphony for Three Orchestras" by Elliott Carter (inspired by the "Bridge") and a painting by Marsden Hartley called "Eight Bells' Folly, Memorial for Hart Crane."

Bibliography

Published by Crane

White Buildings (1926) ISBN 0-87140-179-7
The Bridge (1930) ISBN 0-87140-025-1

Compilations of Letters and/or Poems

The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, Marc Simon, ed. New York: Liveright (1986; Centennial edition with intro. by Harold Bloom, 2000) ISBN 978-0-87140-178-9
O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. intro. and commentary by Langdon Hammer, forward by Paul Bowles. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows (1997) ISBN 978-0-941423-18-2
Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters, Langdon Hammer, ed. New York: The Library of America (2006) ISBN 978-1-931082-99-0.
Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence. Thomas Parkinson ed. and commentary. Berkeley: University of California Press (1978)
The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, Boriswood, 1938 (First UK edition edited by Waldo Frank)

Biographies

Mariani, Paul. The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane. New York: W.W. Norton & Company (1999) ISBN 0-393-32041-3
Untrecker, John. Voyager (1969)

Selected Criticism

Corn, Alfred. 'Hart Crane's "Atlantis,"' The Metamorphoses of Metaphor. Viking (1987)
Dean, Tim. ‘Hart Crane’s Poetics of Privacy,’ American Literary History 8:1 (1996)
Dembo, L. S. Hart Crane’s Sanskrit Charge: A Study of The Bridge. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press (1960)
Gabriel, Daniel. Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic: Canon and Genre Formation in Crane, Pound, Eliot and Williams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2007)
Grossman, Allen. ‘Hart Crane and Poetry: A Consideration of Crane's Intense Poetics With Reference to “The Return,”’ ELH 48:4 (1981)
----. ‘On communicative difficulty in general and “difficult” poetry in particular: the example of Hart Crane's “The Broken Tower,”’ Poem Present lecture series at The University of Chicago. (2004)
Hammer, Langdon. Hart Crane & Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (1993)
Herman, Barbara. ‘The Language of Hart Crane,’ The Sewanee Review 58 (1950)
Lewis, R. W. B. The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (1967)
Pease, Donald. ‘Blake, Crane, Whitman, and Modernism: A Poetics of Pure Possibility’, PMLA 96:1 (1981)
Ramsey, Roger. ‘A Poetics for The Bridge,’ Twentieth Century Literature 26:3 (1980)
Reed, Brian. ‘Hart Crane’s Victrola,’ Modernism/Modernity 7.1 (2000)
----. Hart Crane: After His Lights. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press (2006)
Riddel, Joseph. ‘Hart Crane's Poetics of Failure,’ ELH 33 (1966)
Rowe, John Carlos. ‘The “Super-Historical” Sense of Hart Crane’s The Bridge,’ Genre 11:4 (1978)
Schwartz, Joseph. Hart Crane: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. (1983)
Snediker, Michael. "Hart Crane’s Smile," Modernism/modernity 12.4 (2005)
Trachtenberg, Alan. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1979)
Unterecker, John. "The Architecture of The Bridge," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 3:2 (1962)
Winters, Yvor. "The Progress of Hart Crane," Poetry 36 (June 1930)
----. In Defense of Reason. New York: The Swallow Press and William Morrow (1947)
Yannella, Philip R. ‘“Inventive Dust”: The Metamorphoses of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” Contemporary Literature 15 (1974)
Yingling, Thomas E. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1990)

Notes

^ Exact date seems to be April 1st, but is described somewhat unclearly in Mariani (p. 35)
^ Mariani 1999 p. 421
^ Untrecker, John. Voyager (1969)
^ Hammer 1997 p. 163
^ Hammer 1997 p. 166
^ Dembo, L. S. Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (1960) p. 34
^ See article on White Buildings
^ Lyle Leverich. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1995) p. 162
^ Mariani p. 191
^ Hammer 1997 p. 281
^ Hammer 1997 p. 282
^ Hammer 2006 p. 164
^ Allen Grossman (2005). "On communicative difficulty in general and 'difficult' poetry in particular: the example of Hart Crane's The Broken Tower". GENWI. http://www.genwi.com/play/8096. Retrieved on 2008-04-11.
^ Tim Dean. "Hart Crane's Poetics of Privacy," American Literary History 8:1 (1996) p. 84
^ Thomas Yingling. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. p. 3
^ Brian Reed. Hart Crane: After His Lights (2006)
^ Brian Reed on 'Voyages': http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=180083
^ 'The Progress of Hart Crane,' Poetry 36 (June 1930) pp. 153-65
^ Lee Oser. T. S. Eliot and American Poetry. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press (1998) pp. 112-14.
^ Haw, Richard. The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History (2005) p.175. Also, see the Literary Kicks article, linked below.
^ Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (1997) pp. 9-10
^ Poets Bookshelf p. 126

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Hart Crane

Yale College Lecture on Hart Crane audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
The Fales Library of NYU's guide to the Richard W. Rychtarik/Hart Crane Papers
Brian Reedon on Voyages (at Poetry Foundation)
Modern American Poetry: Hart Crane (1899-1932)
Litkicks article
A Great American Visionary Colm Toibin essay on Crane and review of his selected poems and letters from The New York Review of Books

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1926	White Buildings. Crane's first collection contains "My Grandmother's Love Letters" and "Garden Abstract," dealing with his family background and his sexuality, as well as "Praises for an Urn," an elegy asserting the inviolability of art, and "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," which Crane considers "an answer to the cultural pessimism" of T. S. Eliot.
1930	The Bridge. One of the singular American poetic achievements in the twentieth century, Crane's symphonic sequence uses the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbolic locus for a summation of American experience. As Crane asserted in a letter, "What I am really handling, you see, is the Myth of America."
1933	Collected Poems. Published after his suicide in 1932, this work includes Crane's highly influential corpus of two previous volumes and a number of unpublished poems and West Indies sketches. Despite his short career and relatively small production, critics regard Crane as one of the pivotal figures in modern American literature. Allen Tate called him "one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give the age away."