Hart Crane

Hart Crane
Crane in 1930
Born	Harold Hart Crane (1899-07-21)July 21, 1899 Garrettsville, Ohio, U.S.
Died	April 27, 1932(1932-04-27) (aged 32) Gulf of Mexico
Occupation	Poet
Period	1916–1932
Notable works	The Bridge
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Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Inspired by T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote highly stylized modernist poetry, often noted for its complexity. His collection White Buildings (1926), featuring "Chaplinesque", "At Melville's Tomb", "Repose of Rivers" and "Voyages", helped to cement his place in the avant-garde literary scene of the time. The long poem The Bridge (1930) is an epic inspired by Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and by the Brooklyn Bridge.^[1]

Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. He dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year and left for New York City, promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University. Crane took various jobs, including in copywriting and advertising. Throughout the early 1920s, various small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him among the avant-garde a respect that White Buildings ratified and strengthened. His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge, intended to be an uplifting counter to Eliot's The Waste Land. Initial critical reaction to it was mixed, with many praising the scope but criticizing the quality of the poems. On April 27, 1932, Crane, in an inebriated state, jumped off the steamship USS Orizaba and into the Gulf of Mexico while the ship was en route to New York. He left no suicide note, but witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal. Throughout his life, he had multiple homosexual relations, many of which were described by, or otherwise influenced, his poetry. He had one known female partner, Peggy Cowley, around a year before his death.

Contemporary opinion was mixed, with poets including Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens criticizing his work and others, including William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings, praising it. William Rose Benét wrote that, with The Bridge, Crane "failed in creating what might have been a truly great poem” but that it "reveals potencies in the author that may make his next work even more remarkable."^[1] His last work, "The Broken Tower" (1932), was unfinished and published posthumously. Crane has been praised by several playwrights, poets, and literary critics, including Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Bloom; the latter called him "a High Romantic in the era of High Modernism".^[2][3][4] Allen Tate called Crane “one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give the age away.”^[1]