Last reviewed: June 2017
American modernist poet.
July 21, 1899
Garrettsville, Ohio
April 27, 1932
Gulf of Mexico
Harold Hart Crane was an innovative and vital poet whose relatively small body of work established him as a significant twentieth century American poet. He was the only child of a prosperous family of New England background. Crane suffered an unhappy childhood, his affections divided between his estranged parents. Beginning when he was sixteen years old, he drifted from city to city, writing poetry as he moved. Following publication of one of his poems in The Little Review when he was eighteen, he rejected an opportunity to go to college. Instead, pursuing his interest in books, he found a job in a bookstore in New York. He soon left this job for work in a munitions plant, followed by employment in a Lake Erie shipyard, serving the while as associate editor of a small magazine, The Pagan. He went into advertising in New York after World War I.
More of his poems were published in magazines like The Dial. Encouraged by such writers as Allen Tate and Laura Riding, Crane secured funds from philanthropist Otto Kahn in 1925 and quit the advertising business to devote himself full-time to poetry. White Buildings, his first volume, was published with a foreword by Tate. Hart Crane
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Crane was a poet of the city. The objective purpose of his poems was to fuse the artifacts of the city with romantic idealizations of the past to create a modern Romanticism for city life. It was an attempt in the tradition of Walt Whitman, the poet Crane most admired. His poetry fell short of his goal; unlike Whitman, he was not willing to reveal himself frankly—although he expressed himself fully. The result was a confused combination of clear, brilliant imagery and incoherent private symbolization. What he needed most, some critics felt, was a theme to embody his uncoordinated imagery.
After three years of travel in Europe and elsewhere, Crane published The Bridge. He had found a theme, and the result won him the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine in 1930 and a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year. The poem is a triumph of the use of the principle of "objective correlative." The images are arranged on the basis of emotional rather than logical effect, with the meaning emerging in the reader’s mind at the end. The language is occasionally awkward, however, and the element of confusion, heightened by certain completely private passages, still exists to a degree sufficient to mark the work as a whole imperfect, though impressive.
Crane’s life was a chaotic and turbulent one, plagued by alcoholism, money problems, and confusion over his homosexuality. Crane was not able to achieve the order he desired through his art. On a return trip from Mexico, where he had gone during the year of his fellowship, the thirty-three-year-old Crane jumped from his ship into the Gulf of Mexico. His body was not recovered.