(Harold) Hart Crane - Hart Crane's Poetry and Prose
Poet, born in Garrettsville, Ohio, USA. After an unhappy childhood, he settled in New York City as a writer in 1923. His work is contained in White Buildings (1926), a collection on New York life, and The Bridge (1930), an epic using Brooklyn Bridge as its focal point. He drowned himself by jumping overboard while returning from a visit to Mexico.
Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was a U.S. poet. Eliot, Crane wrote poetry that was traditional in form, difficult and often archaic in language, and which sought to express something more than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot's poetry. Though frequently condemned as being difficult beyond comprehension, Crane has proved in the long run to be one of the most influential poets of his generation.
Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, Hart Crane’s father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business by inventing the Life Saver.
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 homosexual. Crane associated his homosexuality with his vocation as a poet.
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 marineman.
"Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T.S.
The Bridge received poor reviews for the most part, but much worse than that was Crane’s sense of failure.
While on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico in 1931-32, his drinking continued while he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. Crane still felt himself a failure, though, in part because he recommenced homosexual activity despite his relationship with Cowley. Just before noon on April 27, 1932, on a steamship passage back to New York from Mexico—right after he was beaten up for making sexual advances to a male crewmember, 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!"
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