Crane, Hart

Crane, Hart (Harold Hart Crane), 1899–1932, American poet, b. Garrettsville, Ohio. He published only two volumes of poetry during his lifetime, but those works established Crane as one of the most original and vital American poets of the 20th cent. His extraordinarily complex, visionary, and sonorous poetry, with its rich imagery, verbal ingenuity, frequent obscurity, and meticulous craftsmanship, combines ecstatic optimism with a sense of haunted alienation. White Buildings (1926), his first collection of poems, was inspired by his experience of New York City, where he had gone to live at the age of 17. His most ambitious work is The Bridge (1930), a series of closely related long poems on the United States in which the Brooklyn Bridge serves as a mystical unifying symbol of civilization's evolution.

Crane's personal life was anguished and turbulent. After an unhappy childhood during which he was torn between estranged parents, he held a variety of uninteresting jobs, always, however, returning to New York City and his writing. An alcoholic and a homosexual, he was constantly plagued by money problems and was often a severe trial to friends who tried to help him. In 1931 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Mexico to work on a long poem about Latin America; a year later, returning by ship to the United States, the poem not even started, he jumped overboard and drowned. His collected poems were published in 1933.

Bibliography

See Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters (2006), ed. by L. Hammer; letters ed. by T. S. W. Lewis (1974); O My Land, My Friends (1997), selected letters, ed. by L. Hammer and B. Weber; The Correspondence Between Hart Crane and Waldo Frank (1998), ed. by S. H. Cook; biographies by P. Horton (new ed. 1957), J. Unterecker (1969, repr. 1987), P. Mariani (1999), and C. Fisher (2002); studies by R. W. B. Lewis (1967), M. D. Uroff (1974), R. Combs (1978), D. R. Clark, ed. (1982), A. Trachtenberg, ed. (1982), H. Bloom, ed. (1986), M. F. Bennett (1987), W. Berthoff (1989), T. E. Yingling (1990), B. Reed (2006), and G. A. Tapper (2006).

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Crane, (Harold) Hart

(born July 21, 1899, Garrettsville, Ohio, U.S.—died April 27, 1932, at sea, Caribbean Sea) U.S. poet. Crane worked at a variety of jobs before settling in New York City. White Buildings (1926), his first book, includes “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.” His desire to respond to the cultural pessimism of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land resulted in the long and difficult poem The Bridge (1930), which attempts to create an epic myth of the American experience, celebrating the richness of modern life with visionary intensity. Alcoholic and despondent over his homosexuality, he committed suicide at 32 by jumping overboard from a ship in the Caribbean.

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Crane, (Harold) Hart (1899–1932) poet; born in Garrettsville, Ohio. Educated in Cleveland, Ohio, he worked in a shipyard, at his father's drug store, and in advertising before moving to New York City (1923) where he worked briefly for a publishing firm. He is known for his visionary and symbolic poetry, as in The Bridge (1930). He led a dissolute life and traveled widely; returning from a trip to Mexico (1931–32), he apparently jumped off the ship and drowned.