Hart Harold Crane, the US poet, was born July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio; he died 1932.
EditLife and Career
Hart Crane was brought up in Cleveland, Ohio. His father was a businessman, and his parents were always quarrelling.
He had little formal education. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in 1916 in Greenwich Village literary magazines. His first published poem was entitled
C 33 after the prison cell number occupied by
Oscar Wilde.
Over the next decade he moved between New York and Ohio, scraping a living through a variety of jobs and handouts from his family. His employment included being advertising copywriter.
His sexual exploits with other men began when he was a teenager and were detailed in his private notes. He had a particular interest in sailors. One of them was the Danish sea captain Elim Opffer who inspired six of Hart Crane’s poems entitled
Voyages, (1921-1926).
His alcoholism and cadging of money tried the patience of his friends and family. After publishing his two books of poems,
White Buildings, (1926) and
The Bridge, (1930) he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and began to travel and devote himself to poetry. He went to California, Europe, Mexico, Key West, and other parts of the Caribbean.
He was in Mexico in 1932 when he began his first heterosexual affair with Peggy Cowley, the wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley. The two lovers were travelling back to the USA on the steamboat
Orizaba when they quarrelled. Hart Crane got drunk and was beaten up by sailors after he had been flirting with them.
Shortly before noon the next day he took off his jacket and leapt over the railings into the Caribbean and drowned.
EditWork
White Buildings, 1926. The Bridge, 1930.
EditBibliography
Clive Fisher, (2002), “Hart Crane: A Life”, Yale University Press, 576 pages. Blurb: “Born in 1899, Hart Crane became one of the most significant modernist American poets, yet his self-destructive tendencies - violent outbursts, massive drinking binges and dangerous sexual pursuits - came to a catastrophic conclusion when at only thirty-two he threw himself from the stern of an ocean liner into the Gulf of Mexico. This new biography presents for the first time a full, frank portrait of the real Hart Crane.” Paul Mariani, (2000), “The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane”, W. W. Norton, 492 pages, ISBN 0 393 04726 1. - A poet blinded by the white glare of his own myth by George Szirtes in The Times 2, April 20, 2000, page 24. “Tracing the whirlwind of his career and annotating his ambitious, highly sculpted, ‘silken, skilled, transmemberment of song' as one of Crane’s Voyages poems has it, is a demanding task, but Paul Mariani is up to it. The Broken Tower is the passionate biography of a writer who was swept ever deeper into the core of his own white glare, and remains there still, scintillating and radiant as only the lost are.”
- A view of love from depths of self-pity by Peter Lowe in The Times Higher Education Supplement, November 17, 2000, page 43. “The first biography of Crane for 30 years, Mariani’s work draws upon a range of previously suppressed letters and manuscripts. This is a partisan biography, but written with scholarly attention, grounding the poetry within the life. It should receive an audience among those interested in Crane’s status in American verse and those interested in the confused lives that are often transmuted into enduring art.”
A. L. Rowse, (1977), “Homosexuals in History”. John Unterecker, (1969), “Voyager: a life of Crane”. Thomas E, Yingling, (1990), “Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies”.