Hart Crane
Based on Wikipedia: Hart Crane
On April 27, 1932, just before noon, a thirty-two-year-old poet walked to the stern of the steamship Orizaba, shouted "Goodbye, everybody!" to the passengers nearby, and jumped into the Gulf of Mexico. His body was never recovered. He left no note. He had been drinking heavily, as he often did, and the night before, he'd been beaten by crew members after making a sexual advance toward one of them.
The man who disappeared into those waters was Hart Crane, and in the short, turbulent years before that final leap, he had produced some of the most ambitious and controversial poetry in American literature—work that still divides critics nearly a century later.
The Candy Baron's Son
Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, a small town about forty miles east of Cleveland. His father, Clarence Crane, was a businessman with a gift for confection. The elder Crane invented Life Savers candy—those iconic rings with the hole in the middle—but sold the patent for just $2,900 before the brand exploded in popularity. It was the kind of missed fortune that might haunt a man, though Clarence Crane recovered by building a successful chocolate company instead.
The family had money. They moved to Cleveland in 1911, into a comfortable house, and when Hart began attending East High School a few years later, he seemed destined for a conventional upper-middle-class life. But his parents' marriage was disintegrating, and Hart found himself caught between two people who couldn't stop fighting.
He dropped out of high school in December 1916, during his junior year, and fled to New York City. He was seventeen. He promised his parents he would eventually attend Columbia University.
He never did.
The Young Poet in New York
What Crane found in New York was not Columbia but something more important to him: a community of artists, writers, and thinkers who took poetry seriously. He bounced between friends' apartments, took copywriting jobs, and began publishing poems in small but respected literary magazines.
His first published poem appeared in 1917 in a Greenwich Village journal called Bruno's Weekly. It was titled "C33"—a reference to Oscar Wilde's cell number at Reading Gaol, the prison where Wilde served two years of hard labor for "gross indecency" with other men. The magazine misspelled Crane's name as "Harold H Crone," but the choice of subject matter was deliberate. Crane, like Wilde, was homosexual, and he knew early on that his desires placed him outside the boundaries of respectable society.
This was 1917. Homosexuality was not just stigmatized; it was criminal. Crane would navigate this reality for the rest of his life, sometimes finding love and community in the underground gay world of the 1920s, sometimes facing violence and rejection. Many of his poems draw directly from these experiences, though they're often encoded in dense, symbolic language that his contemporaries couldn't always decipher.
A Room with a View of the Bridge
The young Crane shuttled back and forth between New York and Cleveland through the early 1920s, working in advertising, occasionally laboring in his father's candy factory, always writing poetry. But New York was where he felt alive. In a letter to his mother and grandmother in 1924, he described his new apartment in Brooklyn with barely contained joy:
Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the Statue of Liberty, way down the harbour, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right! All of the great new skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are marshaled directly across from you, and there is a constant stream of tugs, liners, sail boats, etc in procession before you on the river!
That view would become the center of his greatest work.
The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, was still relatively new when Crane first saw it—barely forty years old. But it had already become a symbol of American ambition and engineering prowess, a cathedral of steel cables and granite towers spanning the East River. To Crane, it represented something more: a mystical connection between the material and the spiritual, between America's past and its possible future.
White Buildings and the Avant-Garde
In 1926, Crane published his first collection, White Buildings. The book established him as a significant voice in American poetry, though not everyone knew what to make of his work.
Crane's style was dense, allusive, and deliberately difficult. He drew on the Romantics—poets like William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley who believed poetry could access transcendent truths—but he also engaged with the Modernists, particularly T. S. Eliot, whose landmark poem The Waste Land had appeared in 1922. Eliot's poem presented modern civilization as spiritually barren, a heap of fragments and ruins. Crane admired The Waste Land's technical brilliance but rejected its despair.
"It is so damned dead," Crane wrote of Eliot's masterpiece. He saw it as a refusal to acknowledge "certain spiritual events and possibilities."
Crane's self-appointed mission would be different. He wanted to create what he called "a mystical synthesis of America"—a poem that could find spiritual meaning in modern life, in the machines and cities and bridges that defined the twentieth century. If Eliot's Waste Land was a diagnosis of cultural exhaustion, Crane's response would be a hymn to possibility.
One of White Buildings' most celebrated sequences is "Voyages," a series of erotic poems written while Crane was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner. The poems transform the sea into a metaphor for love and desire, mixing sensuality with mysticism in ways that were unprecedented in American poetry. Edmund Wilson, one of the most influential critics of the era, noted that Crane had developed "a style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style."
Almost. That qualifier would haunt Crane's reputation.
The Bridge: An American Epic
The first mention of The Bridge appeared in a 1923 letter to a friend. "I am ruminating on a new longish poem under the title of The Bridge," Crane wrote, "which carries on further the tendencies manifest in 'F and H.'" (He was referring to "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," an earlier poem that attempted to unite classical mythology with modern urban life.)
"It will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish it as I see it now," he added, "so much time will be wasted in thinking about it."
He was right about the difficulty. The Bridge would take seven years to complete, and its composition nearly destroyed him.
The poem uses the Brooklyn Bridge as both its literal subject and its central symbol. From that starting point, Crane attempted to trace the spiritual history of America, moving backward through time to Columbus and the Native Americans, then forward again through the Industrial Revolution to the present day. The poem incorporates Rip Van Winkle, Pocahontas, the Wright Brothers, and the New York subway system. It is wildly ambitious, sometimes brilliant, and frequently obscure.
An arts patron named Otto Kahn gave Crane $2,000 to work on the poem—Crane had asked for a loan of $1,000, but Kahn simply gifted him double that amount. With this money and various other support, Crane labored through the late 1920s, writing sections in Brooklyn, at friends' houses, and eventually in Paris.
Paris and the Black Sun Press
In 1929, Crane traveled to Europe, intending to live in Majorca but ending up in Paris instead. There he connected with Harry and Caresse Crosby, wealthy American expatriates who ran the Black Sun Press, a fine arts publisher specializing in beautifully produced limited editions.
The Crosbys offered Crane the use of their country estate at Le Moulin du Soleil in Ermenonville, north of Paris, hoping the quiet would help him complete The Bridge. He spent several weeks there, working on the "Cape Hatteras" section, a key piece of the panegyric.
But Crane was spiraling. His drinking had grown severe, and he was careening between periods of intense productivity and self-destructive chaos. After returning to Paris from the south of France, Harry Crosby noted in his journal: "Hart C. back from Marseilles where he slept with his thirty sailors and he began again to drink Cutty Sark."
The situation deteriorated rapidly. Crane got drunk at the Café Select and fought with the waiters over his bill. When the police arrived, he fought with them too and was beaten, arrested, and jailed for six days at La Santé prison. Crosby paid his 800-franc fine and advanced him money for passage back to America.
Crane finished The Bridge in the United States. The Black Sun Press published it in Paris in January 1930, and Boni & Liveright released an American edition that April.
The reviews were devastating.
Critical Reception and the Weight of Failure
Contemporary reactions to The Bridge were sharply divided. Some critics admired the poem's ambition and its individual passages of lyrical beauty. Others found it pretentious, incoherent, or simply impossible to understand.
William Rose Benét, writing in The Saturday Review of Literature, offered a typical mixed verdict: Crane had "failed in creating what might have been a truly great poem," but the work "reveals potencies in the author that may make his next work even more remarkable."
The problem, as many saw it, was that Crane's visionary ambitions outstripped his ability to execute them. The Bridge attempts to be an American epic, a mystical hymn to the machine age, and a personal confession all at once. Whether it succeeds depends largely on what you bring to it. Readers who prize clarity and logical structure tend to find it frustrating. Those who respond to Crane's "logic of metaphor"—his term for the associative, emotional connections between images that precede rational thought—often find it overwhelming in the best sense.
Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, both major poets themselves, criticized Crane's work. William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings praised it. The literary world could not agree on what Hart Crane had accomplished.
Crane, meanwhile, struggled with a crushing sense of failure. He had staked everything on The Bridge, and the lukewarm reception felt like a verdict on his life's work.
Mexico and the Last Year
In 1931, Crane received a Guggenheim Fellowship—a prestigious grant intended to support artistic work—and used it to travel to Mexico. He hoped to write an epic poem about the Aztec emperor Montezuma, another attempt at synthesizing history and mythology. Instead, he drank.
His mental state grew increasingly unstable, cycling between depression and manic elation. Then something unexpected happened.
Peggy Cowley, the wife of Crane's friend Malcolm Cowley, was in Mexico seeking a divorce. She and Crane began a romantic relationship on Christmas Day, 1931. As far as anyone knows, she was his only female partner.
Out of this relationship came "The Broken Tower," one of Crane's final poems. He intended it to be "an epic of the modern consciousness," though it runs only fifty-some lines. Critics have interpreted it variously as a death ode, a life ode, a vision poem, and a poem about failed vision. The biographical context—Crane's first and only heterosexual affair—is generally undisputed, but what the poem means remains contested.
He submitted "The Broken Tower" to Poetry Magazine. They rejected it.
Despite his relationship with Peggy, Crane continued to pursue homosexual encounters, and this seemed to deepen his despair. He had multiple times claimed he would commit suicide.
The Orizaba
In April 1932, Crane and Peggy Cowley decided to return to New York. Crane's father had died the previous month, and his stepmother had invited him back to settle the estate. They booked passage on the steamship Orizaba—the same ship on which Crane had traveled to Cuba six years earlier.
The ship departed from Vera Cruz on April 23 and stopped at Havana on April 26. That night, Crane made sexual advances toward a male crew member. He was beaten.
The next morning, just before noon, he walked to the stern of the ship and jumped.
The Orizaba was about 300 miles from Cuba. Though the crew searched, they never found him. The New York Times ran an article the following day, noting the connection to his father's recent death. A marker was placed on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville, Ohio: "Harold Hart Crane 1899–1932 lost at sea."
The Logic of Metaphor
What are we to make of Hart Crane's poetry today?
His work is difficult by design. In "General Aims and Theories," an essay he circulated among friends but never published during his lifetime, Crane explained his method: "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."
This "logic of metaphor," as he called it, "antedates our so-called pure logic, and is the genetic basis of all speech." In other words, Crane believed that metaphor was not an ornament added to plain meaning but the fundamental way humans understand the world. His poems don't proceed by argument but by association, stacking images whose connections are felt rather than stated.
This approach explains both why his admirers find his work so powerful and why his critics find it so exasperating. If you expect a poem to make a claim and support it with evidence, Crane will frustrate you. If you're willing to surrender to the rhythm and let the images work on you, he can be intoxicating.
Legacy
After Crane's death, his reputation underwent the usual cycles of reassessment. The New Critics, who dominated American literary scholarship in the mid-twentieth century and prized formal unity and ironic detachment, tended to view him as a cautionary tale—a poet with extraordinary gifts who lacked the discipline to realize them fully.
But other readers kept coming back. Robert Lowell, one of the most important poets of the next generation, praised him. So did the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Tennessee Williams, the playwright, admired Crane deeply and wrote a play about him.
Harold Bloom, the influential literary critic, championed Crane throughout his career, calling him "a High Romantic in the era of High Modernism." Allen Tate, who had been Crane's friend and occasional antagonist, wrote that he was "one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give the age away."
What Tate meant, perhaps, was that Crane's contradictions were America's contradictions: the drive toward transcendence and the pull toward destruction, the faith in the machine age and the suspicion that something essential was being lost, the desire to synthesize a national mythology and the knowledge that no such synthesis was possible.
The Bridge may or may not be a great poem. Reasonable people disagree. But Crane's attempt—to find spiritual meaning in cables and steel, to locate the sacred in the modern city—remains one of the most audacious projects in American literature. And his early lyrics, particularly "Voyages" and the other poems in White Buildings, are among the most beautiful things written in English in the twentieth century.
He was thirty-two when he jumped into the Gulf of Mexico. In those thirty-two years, he had produced two books, numerous uncollected poems, and an influence that would ripple through generations of writers who came after him. Whether that constitutes triumph or tragedy probably depends on what you think poetry is supposed to do.
What is not disputed is that something was lost when Hart Crane went into the water—something the world never got back.