Top Questions
Hart Crane is most famous for his ambitious, epic poem ‘To Brooklyn Bridge.’ It was published in 1930 by Black Sun Press. The work was created as a homage to the excellent poem of T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land.’
On July 21, 1899, Garrettsville, Ohio, was the birthplace of Hart Crane, the American Romantic poet. He was born into the Crane family to Clarence A. Crane and his mother, Grace Edna Hart. His relationships with his family members were turbulent.
Yes, Hart Crane was a successful poet overall, earning a Guggenheim fellowship, for example. However, he became primarily known for his excellent poem ‘To Brooklyn Bridge.’
It is said that Hart Crane took literary inspiration from sources such as Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Ezra Pound.
Hart Crane died a tragic death at the young age of 32. In a suicide, he jumped from the steamship SS Orizaba into the Gulf of Mexico while en route from Mexico to New York City. Depression and alcoholism were a constant throughout his life, and his death marked the premature end of a promising poetic career.
Hart Crane was a 20th-century American Romantic poet who became synonymous with the poem ‘To Brooklyn Bridge.’ Crane had a turbulent upbringing, and this contributed to his masterful works. Throughout the years, a number of his peers, such as Allen Tate, have commented on his career. He described Crane as “one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give the age away.”
Early Life and Education
Harold Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, in July of 1899. He was the son of Clarence A. Crane and his mother, Grace Edna Hart. Clarence was a businessman who invited the Life Savers candy. Unfortunately, he sold the patent before the product became popular. The Cranes did not have a happy marriage despite being secure financially on paper.
Crane’s early years were full of turbulence. They fought throughout Hart Crane’s childhood and eventually divorced when he was eighteen. An early move to Warren, Ohio, was the precursor to his mother being admitted to a sanitarium after the continuation of toxicity within the family. Since details have come out about his childhood, his mother and father are seen as very bad influences on him. He wrote to his mother around the age of twenty, “but I think it’s time you realized that for the last eight years my youth has been a rather bloody background for your’s and father’s sex life and troubles.” It is clear that his rocky parental foundation stuck with him.
His childhood was spent mainly under the guardianship of his grandmother. She owned an extensive collection of books, and it was within her library that Crane was first exposed to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. These writers would come to play a major role in Crane’s writing. His teenage years saw him investigate the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley and novelist Honore de Balzac. He was also interested in philosophy, specifically Plato’s. Crane’s family had a number of financial issues that kept him from attending school consistently.
He spent two years at East High School in Cleveland before dropping out. He immediately moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. It was his goal to be accepted to the university via the entrance exam. When he arrived in New York City, Crane started a career in writing instead. He worked at various copywriting jobs and moved frequently. He eventually found work at an advertising agency as a copywriter and within his father’s factory.
Throughout the following years, Crane began writing his own works. These were published by small literary magazines, such as Pagan. These works showed an interest in both traditional writing and experimental techniques. His first volume of poetry, White Buildings, was published in 1926. It was met with positive reviews and contains some of his best-known works. These include ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,’ ‘Chaplinesque,’ and ‘Voyages.’ These years also saw him fall in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant. The two moved in together in Brooklyn Heights in 1924.
Unfortunately, the relationship did not last, and Crane’s emotional state began to deteriorate. He spent a great deal of time either euphoric or depressed. These upheavals were calmed through increased consumption of alcohol and homosexual relations. His grandmother, who had been so important to his childhood, died in 1928. His father, with whom he’d had a difficult relationship, died soon after, leaving Crane with an inheritance.
Year in Paris
Hart Crane took the money he had inherited from his father and traveled to Europe. While there, he associated with some of the most prominent figures in Paris’s American expatriate community. He continued to drink and was arrested at one point for fighting a waiter over his tab. He spent six days in prison before Harry Crosby, one of his close friends, paid the 800 francs fine.
It was around this period that Crane returned to America and finished his long work The Bridge, otherwise known as ‘To Brooklyn Bridge.’ It was meant as a response to T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland.’
Hart Crane has published other notable poems such as:
- ‘The Harbor Dawn‘
- ‘Cutty Sark‘
- ‘The Tunnel‘
- ‘The Wine Menagerie‘
- ‘O Carib Isle!’
He had been working on this piece since before the publication of White Buildings, but it was not received well. The reviews stated that he had come close to making a great poem but ultimately failed. Crane’s darkening mental state was not improved by the reviews. He has stopped writing and did not seem to be able to return to his previous creative works.
Final Years and Suicide
The following years saw him apply for and receive a Guggenheim fellowship. It was his intention to travel to Europe and study the culture. He would, he proposed, investigate the American poetic sensibility. Rather than traveling to Europe, though, he went to Mexico. It was here he engaged in his first heterosexual relationship with Peggy Baird. She was married to Malcolm Crowley, an American writer and historian. The two eventually divorced, and Peggy joined Crane.
One of Crane’s final works, ‘The Broken Tower,’ came out of this relationship. He was unable to shake the feeling that he was ultimately a failure. These thoughts had plagued him for a while but came to a head in 1932.
Hart Crane has embarked on a trip to New York on the steamship Orizaba. While onboard, he made advances on a male crew member and was beaten. On April 27th, after drinking heavily, he stood on the railing of the ship and called out, “Goodbye, everybody!” And jumped into the Gulf of Mexico. He did not leave a suicide note, and his body was never recovered. A marker was put up in Park Cemetery in Ohio.
After his death, Hart Crane’s poetry was still in demand, and the collection The Collected Poems of Hart Crane was published. It was followed by collections of his letters and two more anthologies of his works published in 1986 and 2006.
