Hart Crane

Writing

Influences

Crane was heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot, in particular The Waste Land. The Bridge was intended to be a more optimistic view of society than that of The Waste Land. He first read The Waste Land in the November 1922 edition of The Dial.

Walt Whitman, William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emily Dickinson were also particularly influential to Crane. As a teenager, Crane also read Plato, Honoré de Balzac, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Criticism

Crane's critical effort is mostly to be found in his letters: he corresponded regularly with Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and Gorham Munson, and shared critical dialogues with Eugene O'Neill, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Burke, Waldo Frank, Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. He was also an acquaintance of H. P. Lovecraft, who would eventually voice concern over Crane's premature aging due to alcohol abuse. Selections of Crane's letters are available in many editions of his poetry. His two most famous stylistic defenses emerged from correspondences: his "General Aims and Theories" (1925) was written to urge Eugene O'Neill's critical foreword to White Buildings, then passed around among friends, yet unpublished during Crane's life; and the famous "Letter to Harriet Monroe" (1926) was part of an exchange for the publication of "At Melville's Tomb" in Poetry.

"Logic of metaphor"

Crane's most quoted criticism is in the circulated, if long and unpublished, "General Aims and Theories": "As to technical considerations: the motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor,' which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension."

There is also some mention of it, though it is not so much presented as a critical neologism, in his letter to Harriet Monroe: "The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology." L. S. Dembo's influential study of The Bridge, Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (1960), reads this 'logic' well within the familiar rhetoric of the Romantics: "The Logic of metaphor was simply the written form of the 'bright logic' of the imagination, the crucial sign stated, the Word made words.... As practiced, the logic of metaphor theory is reducible to a fairly simple linguistic principle: the symbolized meaning of an image takes precedence over its literal meaning; regardless of whether the vehicle of an image makes sense, the reader is expected to grasp its tenor."

Style

Difficulty

The publication of White Buildings was delayed by Eugene O'Neill's struggle (and eventual failure) to articulate his appreciation in a foreword to it; and many critics since have used Crane's difficulty as an excuse for a quick dismissal. O'Neill did, however, write a draft for such a foreword. The text said of Crane that "the great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader, is naturally, the style. The theme never appears in explicit statement". The publisher Harcourt rejected White Buildings, with Harrison Smith writing Crane is "a genuine poet ... [but White Buildings] is really the most perplexing kind of poetry." A young Tennessee Williams, then falling in love with Crane's poetry, could "hardly understand a single line—of course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect." Crane was aware that his poetry was difficult. Some of his essays originated as encouraging epistles, explications and stylistic apologies to editors, updates to his patron, and both well-considered or impulsive letters to friends. It was only his exchange with Harriet Monroe at Poetry, when she initially refused to print "At Melville's Tomb", that urged Crane to describe his "logic of metaphor" in print:

If the poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and logic—what field of added consciousness and increased perceptions (the actual province of poetry, if not lullabies) can be expected when one has to relatively return to the alphabet every breath or two? In the minds of people who have sensitively read, seen, and experienced a great deal, isn't there a terminology something like short-hand as compared to usual description and dialectics, which the artist ought to be right in trusting as a reasonable connective agent toward fresh concepts, more inclusive evaluations?

Monroe was not impressed, though she acknowledged that others were, and printed the exchange alongside the poem:

You find me testing metaphors, and poetic concept in general, too much by logic, whereas I find you pushing logic to the limit in a painfully intellectual search for emotion, for poetic motive.

Crane had a relatively well-developed rhetoric for the defense of his poems; here is an excerpt from "General Aims and Theories":

New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation. ...the voice of the present, if it is to be known, must be caught at the risk of speaking in idioms and circumlocutions sometimes shocking to the scholar and historians of logic.

"Homosexual text"

As a child, he had a sexual relationship with a man.

Criticism since the late 20th century has suggested reading Crane's poems—"The Broken Tower", "My Grandmother's Love Letters", the "Voyages" series, and others—with an eye to homosexual meanings in the text. Queer theorist Tim Dean argues that the obscurity of Crane's style owes partially to the necessities of being a semi-public homosexual—not quite closeted, but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open: "The intensity responsible for Crane's particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces a kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy."

Thomas Yingling objects to the traditional, New Critical and Eliotic readings of Crane, arguing that the "American myth criticism and formalist readings" have "depolarized and normalized our reading of American poetry, making any homosexual readings seem perverse." Even more than a personal or political problem, though, Yingling argues that such "biases" obscure much of what the poems make clear; he cites, for instance, the last lines of "My Grandmother's Love Letters" from White Buildings as a haunting description of estrangement from the norms of (heterosexual) family life:

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

Brian Reed has contributed to a project of critical reintegration of queer criticism with other critical methods, suggesting that an overemphasis on the sexual biography of Crane's poetry can skew a broader appreciation of his overall work. In one example of Reed's approach, he published a close reading of Crane's lyric poem, "Voyages", (a love poem that Crane wrote for his lover Emil Opffer) on the Poetry Foundation website, analyzing the poem based strictly on the content of the text itself and not on outside political or cultural matters.

Accusations of plagiarism

In mid-December 1926, Crane visited William Murrell Fisher in Woodstock, a literary critic whom he first met via their mutual friend Gorham Munson. There, Fisher shared with Crane multiple manuscripts of poems by Samuel Greenberg, a little-known poet who had died in 1917. Writing to Gorham Munson on December 20, Crane wrote, "This poet, Grünberg, [sic] which Fisher nursed until he died of consumption at a Jewish Hospital in New York was a Rimbaud in embryo ... Fisher has shown me an amazing amount of material, some of which I am copying and will show you when I get back." Morris Greenberg, Samuel's brother, had given five of Samuel's notebooks to Fisher so that they could be published. Crane copied forty-two poems from the notebooks, which he borrowed from Fisher for a period of less than a month. Many of Crane's poems consisted of lines and phrases taken from Greenberg's poems, always unattributed. Crane's poem "Emblems of Conduct", the third in White Buildings, consisted solely of rearranged lines from Greenberg's poems.

The plagiarism went unnoticed for decades until Marc Simon published Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane and the Lost Manuscripts in 1978, detailing how Crane copied from Greenberg. Scholarly interpretation over the intent and morality of Hart Crane's actions varies. Writer and critic Samuel R. Delany argues Crane merely tried to draw attention to an unknown poet and wanted readers to experience for themselves the delight of realizing one of his influences without him telling them.

Influence

Among contemporaries

Crane was admired by artists including Eugene O'Neill, Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson, E. E. Cummings, Tennessee Williams and William Carlos Williams. Although Crane had his sharp critics, among them Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, Moore did publish his work, as did T. S. Eliot, who, moving even further out of Pound's sphere, may have borrowed some of Crane's imagery for Four Quartets, in the beginning of "East Coker", which is reminiscent of the final section of "The River", from The Bridge.

Yvor Winters and Allen Tate both praised White Buildings but considered The Bridge to be a failure.

Legacy

Mid-century American poets, such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell, cited Crane as a significant influence. Both poets also wrote about Crane in their poetry. Berryman wrote him one of his famous elegies in The Dream Songs, and Lowell published his "Words for Hart Crane" in Life Studies (1959): "Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age, / must lay his heart out for my bed and board." Lowell thought that Crane was the most important American poet of the generation to come of age in the 1920s, stating that "[Crane] got out more than anybody else ... he somehow got New York City; he was at the center of things in the way that no other poet was." Lowell also described Crane as being "less limited than any other poet of his generation."

Tennessee Williams said that he wanted to be "given back to the sea" at the "point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back". One of Williams's last plays, a "ghost play" titled Steps Must Be Gentle, explores Crane's relationship with his mother.

In a 1991 interview with Antonio Weiss of The Paris Review, the literary critic Harold Bloom talked about how Crane, along with William Blake, initially sparked his interest in literature at a very young age:

I was preadolescent, ten or eleven years old. I still remember the extraordinary delight, the extraordinary force that Crane and Blake brought to me—in particular Blake's rhetoric in the longer poems—though I had no notion what they were about. I picked up a copy of The Collected Poems of Hart Crane in the Bronx Library. I still remember when I lit upon the page with the extraordinary trope, "O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits / The agile precincts of the lark's return." I was just swept away by it, by the Marlovian rhetoric. I still have the flavor of that book in me. Indeed it's the first book I ever owned. I begged my oldest sister to give it to me, and I still have the old black and gold edition she gave me for my birthday back in 1942 . . . I suppose the only poet of the twentieth century that I could secretly set above Yeats and Stevens would be Hart Crane.

Bloom also authored the introduction to the centennial edition of the Complete Poems of Hart Crane.

Thomas Lux has stated, "If the devil came to me and said 'Tom, you can be dead and Hart can be alive,' I'd take the deal in a heartbeat if the devil promised, when arisen, Hart would have to go straight into A.A."

The literary critic Adam Kirsch has argued that "[Crane has been] a special case in the canon of American modernism, his reputation never quite as secure as that of Eliot or Stevens."

In 2011, the American poet Gerald Stern wrote an essay on Crane in which he stated, "Some, when they talk about Crane, emphasize his drinking, his chaotic life, his self-doubt, and the dangers of his sexual life, but he was able to manage these things, even though he died at 32, and create a poetry that was tender, attentive, wise, and radically original." At the conclusion of his essay, Stern writes, "Crane is always with me, and whatever I wrote, short poem or long, strange or unstrange—his voice, his tone, his sense of form, his respect for life, his love of the word, his vision have affected me. But I don't want, in any way, to exploit or appropriate this amazing poet whom I am, after all, so different from, he who may be, finally, the great poet, in English, of the twentieth century."

Beyond poetry, Crane's suicide inspired several works of art by noted artist Jasper Johns, including "Periscope", "Land's End", and "Diver", as well as A Symphony of Three Orchestras by Elliott Carter (inspired by The Bridge) and the painting Eight Bells' Folly, Memorial for Hart Crane by Marsden Hartley.

Depictions

Crane is the subject of The Broken Tower, a 2011 American student film by the actor James Franco who wrote, directed, and starred in the film which was the master's thesis project for his MFA in filmmaking at New York University. He loosely based his script on Paul Mariani's 1999 nonfiction book The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane. Despite being a student film, The Broken Tower was shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2011 and received DVD distribution in 2012 by Focus World Films.

Crane appears as a character in Samuel R. Delany's story "Atlantis: Model 1924", and in The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.