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| HART CRANE 21 July 1899 – 27 April 1932 |
I
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.
And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:
O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.
––And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;
Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptered terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers' hands.
And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,––
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,––
Hasten, while they are true,––sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath to us no earthly shore until
Is answered to the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
Infinite consanguinity it bears––
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.
And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,––
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,––
Upon the steep floor hung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song:
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands…
Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
Chilled albatross's white immutability)
No stream of greater love advancing now
Than, singing, this mortality alone
Through clay aflow immortally to you.
All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
Madly meeting logically in this hour
And region that is ours to wreathe again,
Portending eyes and lips and making told
The chancel port and portion of our June––
Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I
Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?
In signature of the incarnate word
The harbour shoulders to resign in mingling
Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
And widening noon within your breast for gathering
All bright insinuations that my years have caught
For islands where must lead inviolably
Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,––
In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.
Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
Together in one merciless white blade––
The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.
––As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars,
One frozen trackless smile… What words
Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we
Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
And changed… 'There's
Nothing like this in the world,' you say,
Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
Too, into that godless cleft of sky
Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.
'––And never to quite understand!' No,
In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy.
But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
Your eyes are already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies,
Steadily as a shell secretes
Its beating leagues of monotone,
Or as many waters trough the sun's
Red kelson past the cape's wet stone;
O rivers mingling toward the sky
And harbor of the phoenix's breast––
My eyes pressed black against the prow,
––Thy derelict and blinded guest
Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,
I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
More savage than the death of kings,
Some splintered garland for the seer.
Beyond sirroccos harvesting
The solstice thunders, crept away,
Like a cliff swinging or a sail
Flung into April's inmost day––
Creation's blithe and petalled word
To the lounged goddess when she rose
Conceding dialogue with eyes
That smile unsearchable repose––
Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,
––Unfolded floating dais before
Which rainbows twine continual hair––
Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!
The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.
Harold Hart Crane, who was once described by critic and fellow poet Malcolm Cowley as 'one of the two or three people who can write twentieth century blank verse, about other subjects than love death and nightingales' and by their mutual friend the playwright Eugene O'Neill as 'one of the few modern American poets possessed of real genius' was born in the northeastern Ohio town of Garrettsville on 21 July 1899, the only child of local maple syrup manufacturer Clarence Arthur Crane and his wife of one year Grace Edna Hart. He would remain known as Harold Crane until 1917 when, after his mother asked him in a letter if he 'intended to ignore your mother's side of the house entirely,' he began to sign his work 'Hart Crane.'
As a child Crane was precocious and hypersensitive, often suffering nervous collapses either wholly or partly as the result of the continual fighting of his querulous, ill-suited parents. (Grace and CA, as his father was known, had married quickly without really getting to know each other and would divorce, after several unsuccessful attempts to reconcile, in 1918.) He found solace of a sort in the Cleveland home of his maternal grandmother Elizabeth, where he moved in 1908 after his mother suffered a nervous breakdown and entered a sanitorium. His parents tried to reconcile in 1909, when his father also moved to Cleveland to start what would become yet another prosperous new business known as the Crane Chocolate Company. (Around this time CA Crane also invented a hard ring-shaped candy he named Life Savers, the patent of which he quickly sold to future multi-millionaire media mogul Edward J Noble for $2900).
Crane began attending high school in Cleveland in 1914, by which time his parents' rocky marriage was once again in trouble –– trouble which prompted him to attempt suicide by slashing his wrists while spending a miserable vacation with them at a family owned property on the Isle of Pines in Cuba. This incident may have prompted his father, who supposedly already knew of his desire to become a poet, to send him to Roycroft, an artist's colony in rural New York, for the summer. Here Crane met Harriet Moody, widow of the poet William Vaughan Moody and an important figure in the artistic life of Chicago. The following fall he sent a poem, titled Nocturne, to Moody before accompanying his mother on a vacation that would take them to Wyoming and California and as far north as Canada.
Determined to fulfil his ambition to become a recognized poet, Crane managed to have two of his poems published in 1916, the second of which, titled October-November, appeared in the Modernist New York literary magazine The Pagan. Shortly after this he dropped out of high school, working for a time as a printer's assistant before enrolling for courses at Columbia University in New York City and leaving Cleveland for what, from that point onward, he would regard as his true spiritual if not physical home. His epic fifteen part poem The Bridge, published in 1930, was inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge –– a structure which served as a powerful symbol of the city he loved and the sprawling colossus that was late nineteenth and early twentieth century North America.
Crane would spend much of the next four years shuttling back and forth between New York and Cleveland. The trips back to Ohio –– which would see him remain there for much of 1920 –– were necessary to persuade his father to keep providing him with the small allowance he was able to supplement by working at a variety of poorly paid and briefly held jobs, including bookstore clerk, associate editor of The Pagan and, once back in his native state, as a machinist in a munitions factory and, for a week or so, as a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He combined these occupations with the composition, revision and occasional publishing of new poems, voracious reading –– he was by this time thoroughly familiar with the work of TS Eliot and most if not all of the great Elizabethan and metaphysical poets and had even hired a French tutor so he could become fluent enough in the language to read the work of Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud in the original –– and a number of passionate homosexual affairs of varying duration, including one conducted while working as a salesman for his father's candy company in Akron. Following a sales trip to Washington DC in April 1921, during which Crane failed to open the new territories his father had specifically sent him to the capital to open, they argued and did not communicate again for the next two years.
After moving back in with his mother, Crane found work as an advertising copywriter –– an experience he would later put to good use when writing the section of The Bridge titled The River which mimics the type of blatantly commercial language which had now become commonplace in 1920s North America. Advertising became Crane's primary means of support over the next three years as he continued to combine the composition of poetry –– including the earliest drafts of what became The Bridge –– with the writing of ads for Corday and Gross and, from early 1924, for the J Walter Thompson Agency in New York. He quit the Thompson agency at the end of the year and rejected an offer from his father (they were now on speaking terms again) to resume his former role as a traveling salesman for the Crane company, only to take further jobs in advertising while his reputation as a poet, strengthened by the publication of poems like For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen –– which he claimed was his 'reply' to the work of TS Eliot –– continued to grow, earning him the admiration of fellow poets like Malcolm Cowley (who also worked in advertising), EE Cummings and Allen Tate as well as film comedian Charlie Chaplin who paid him a surprise visit one day to express his admiration for the poem Chaplinesque which Crane had written about him and published in 1921. Crane also found time, as he nearly always did, to squeeze in a passionate affair with a Danish sailor named Emil Oppfer (the subject of the poem Voyages) and to drink excessively while preparing what would become White Buildings, his first poetry collection published by Boni and Liveright in December 1926.
As would happen throughout his career and then posthumously, Crane's work provoked mixed responses from the critics and his fellow poets, several of whom were put off by its overt Romanticism, the difficulty of its language and what they deemed to be its lack of clarity. (They
may have found it helpful to read it aloud –– advice I would offer
to anyone who struggles to 'understand' Crane's work in conventional
rather than purely poetic terms. Crane's poems are not so much about revealing literal meaning as
they are about the power of language and the rhythms he created with it, many of
which echo without necessarily copying those of Elizabethan blank verse and the work of his spiritual and poetic predecessor Walt Whitman.) Undeterred, he pushed on with The Bridge, supporting himself throughout 1927 on the charity of friends, another small allowance from his father and, from November onward, by working as secretary and paid companion to thirty-four year old stockbroker Herbert Wise who was recovering from a stress-induced nervous breakdown. As a member of Wise's extensive entourage, he soon left New York for Los Angeles, living close to his mother Grace and his ailing grandmother who had also moved west following the collapse of Grace's second marriage.
Crane remained in California until May 1928 when, after reuniting with Emil Oppfer and being severely beaten after a night of heavy drinking with him in a San Pedro speakeasy, he quarrelled with his mother who then demanded that he move out, only to complain of kidney trouble and flee to a local hospital when he attempted to comply with her request. In the end, Crane snuck away in the middle of the night, unaware that this was the last time he would ever see her or his beloved grandmother Elizabeth Hart who would die on 6 September leaving him a $5000 inheritance that Grace, as co-trustee, refused to hand over until he somehow persuaded the other trustees that he was legally entitled to receive it. (His mother apparently had the idea that they would live together on the bequest, becoming so stubborn about it that Crane even considered suing her at one point in order to gain access to the money.) With this $5000 windfall to pay his way, the poet booked passage for London, arriving in the English capital in December and then moving on to Paris in January 1929.
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| HART CRANE in New York City, c 1930 |
It did not take Crane long to cross paths with Harry Crosby –– poet, former World War One ambulance driver and a member of one of the richest banking dynasties in North America who, with his wife Caresse (born Mary Phelps Jacob), ran the Paris-based Black Sun Press, a small publishing house specializing in luxurious limited editions of works by cutting edge modernist writers including James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound. Crosby, a self-confessed hedonist who regularly smoked hashish, used cocaine and enjoyed an open marriage which saw him have sexual encounters with dozens of young women, was impressed enough by The Bridge to offer to publish it –– an offer that saw Crane spend the first half of 1929 living a peripatetic life in France while working feverishly to complete it. His task was not made easier by his worsening alcoholism, which caused him to alienate many of the friends and acquaintances upon whom he was now fully dependent for accommodation and financial support.
In July, after starting a fight in the Café Select over an unpaid bar bill, Crane was arrested by the French police and spent the next six days in jail. The day after his release, after securing a loan from Crosby to pay for his ticket, he was on his way back to New York where, six months later, he would host a party for his friend and publisher less than a week before Crosby and his mistress Josephine Bigelow were found dead in their hotel room of self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head. Their double suicide, a shocking scandal at the time, did not prevent Crane from mailing the final revisions of The Bridge to the Paris office of the Black Sun Press on Boxing Day.
The last two years of Crane's life proved to be every bit as chaotic as his time in France had been, punctuated by episodes of erratic behaviour triggered by his virtually continuous consumption of alcohol, casual sexual encounters with sailors and other types of 'rough trade' (who would occasionally rob and physically assault him) and sporadic attempts to gain some kind of control over his life by applying for a Guggenheim fellowship and moving, at the end of 1930, back to Ohio to live with his father and work again in the family business. When his application for a Guggenheim fellowship was approved in March 1931, Crane took the $2000 that was intended to support him for a year and, at the suggestion of Malcolm Cowley and Cowley's soon to be ex-wife Peggy, immediately set sail for Mexico.
Arriving in Mexico City in April, Crane became the houseguest of his fellow Guggenheim recipient Katherine Anne Porter, staying with the writer until his obnoxious behavior forced her –– as it had forced so many of the other people whose hospitality he had so blithely abused over the past two years –– to demand that he leave. He remained in Mexico until July, spending at least one night in prison after barging uninvited into an official function at the US embassy and later shouting obscenities at Porter in front of her house in the middle of the night.
The sudden death of his father in July 1931 forced Crane to return to Ohio to oversee the funeral arrangements and help settle his estate. He was back in Mexico a few weeks later, drinking as heavily as ever and telling new friends like historian Lesley Baird Simpson of his plans to write a long verse drama set in the time of the Aztecs. He was also attacked in print by HL Mencken and Max Eastman who, like other conservative minded critics, were as unimpressed by The Bridge as they had been by White Buildings. By December he was in Taxco, staying with Peggy Cowley who had come south to obtain a quick Mexican divorce and soon became his first-ever female lover. Although their relationship appeared to have a stabilizing effect on him for a time, he continued to have sex with men and to drink as self-destructively as ever.
Crane was still in Mexico with Peggy when his Guggenheim fellowship expired in March 1932. Depressed about his career, often drunk or hungover and now seriously short of money, he spoke of killing himself and even attempted to do so by swallowing iodine, earning a brief stay in hospital for his trouble. Within a month, having learned that the bequest made to him in his father's will would not be paid due to lack of funds and that the most he could count on receiving was the same small monthly allowance he'd been receiving since 1927, he was on his way back to New York on the SS Oribaza, the same ship which had brought him to Mexico two years earlier.
After a stopover in Havana, where he went ashore to get drunk, Crane spent much of the night of 26 April raging through the ship after Peggy's arm was accidentally burned. (Some believe he may have gone on a bender because he asked Peggy to marry him and she refused, but this story has never been confirmed.) Some time in the early hours of 27 April, still belligerently drunk, he propositioned a male crew member for sex and was severely beaten by the man, which may (or may not) have served as the catalyst for him to commit suicide –– around noon that same day in front of several witnesses –– by leaping from the ship's deck into the Gulf of Mexico. (Some of these witnesses claimed that he cried 'Goodbye everybody!' before plunging to his death, although this story, like so much of what has been written about him over the years, could well be apocryphal.)
Crane's body was never recovered but thankfully his poetry, which has been the subject of frequent reappraisals since his death, was there to influence future generations of American artists including playwright Tennessee Williams, painter Jasper Johns and filmmaker/actor James Franco whose 2011 student film, The Broken Tower, was based on his brief but tumultuous life as recounted by poet and academic Paul L Mariani in his 1999 biography of the same name.
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| Rabbit Bandini Productions, 2012 |
Use the link below to read more poems by North American poet HART CRANE:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hart-crane
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Last updated 26 September 2023
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