Harold Hart Crane was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T.S.Eliot , Crane wrote modernist poetry that is difficult, highly stylized, and very ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem in the vein of The Waste Land that expressed something more sincere and optimistic than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot's poetry. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has come to be seen as one of the most influential poets of his generation. By 1922 Crane had already written many of the poems that would comprise his first collection, White Buildings. Among the most important of these verses is "Chaplinesque," which he produced after viewing the great comic Charlie Chaplin's film "The Kid." In this poem Chaplin's chief character—a fun-loving, mischievous tramp—represents the poet, whose own pursuit may be perceived as trivial but is nonetheless profound. For Crane, the film character's optimism and sensitivity bears similarities to poets' own outlooks toward adversity, and the tramp's apparent disregard for his own persecution is indication of his innocence: "We will sidestep, and to the final smirk / Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb / That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, / Facing the dull squint with what innocence / And what surprise!"
In the years since his death, Crane has earned recognition as an ambitious and accomplished—if not entirely successful—poet, one whose goals vastly exceeded his capabilities (and, probably, anyone else's) but whose talent nonetheless enabled him to explore the limits of self-expression both provocatively and profoundly.Following are few of the Hart Crane's great poems.

 

My Grandmother's Love Letters

My Grandmother's Love Letters

There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

'Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?'

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.

Harold Hart Crane

It would seem that we live in a world full of contradictions. You might say “Surely you haven’t just realised this?”, and yes, it’s always been apparent in my line of thinking, but one facet of modern society has really struck me as being particularly incongruous. For a few years now, the buzzword in all the most fashionable circles has been ‘vintage’. From kitting ourselves out to decorating homes, what’s on the catwalk and what’s in every on-trend publication, there’s really no other way to go than retro. Yet not much can be called truly vintage in this day and age, with its hyper-technological focus. Telephone boxes are becoming obsolete and serve little purpose except to pose for a not-very-wacky picture in and to be exported abroad as a rather faded symbol of British-ness. Typewriters have long collected dust in many an attic – unless you’re a writer with a stickler for tradition – in favour of computers, laptops and iPads, and there is increasing talk of the humble paperback being replaced in favour of the latest electronic reading devices.

Perhaps the most unfortunate consequence of the contradiction between aspiring for the feel of years gone by while utilising every gadget that couldn’t be more up-to-date unless they came somehow transported from the future is the distinct lack of letters; the most vintage form of communication (barring telegrams). There’s been much talk of good old-fashioned letter writing fast becoming a lost art amongst the more convenient, but not so eloquent, methods of e-mail, instant messaging and social networking, and that would be something to lament. I confess, ashamedly, I’m not doing much to help the cause; the last time I composed a ‘proper’ letter was, I estimate, around eight or so years ago. It’s not just the letter itself that is something special; it’s the process of writing a letter that really affects. The time and effort it takes to make it just right, the painstaking selection of the perfect vocabulary, sometimes (if the situation calls for it) the outpouring of sheer emotion from the heart via pen and paper. Equally thrilling to be the recipient; to excitedly – or apprehensively – break open that seal and soak up every word, beginning to formulate the draft of a reply inside your mind. Now more so the product of history, a third participant - the onlooker placed very much in the present but gazing far back past sometimes even their own existence – takes the privileged position. Perhaps that’s the most exciting position of all to be in, to be connected to the past in such a personal way. But it’s also somehow rather sad, the act of reading rather than writing a letter becoming an abstraction and rendering much of the original emotion contained within faded, much like an old and torn picture.

This unification of the past and the present, and the distinction between different generations is explored in this particularly moving poem by Hart Crane. As much about the simple and tender relationship between a grandmother and grandchild as well as their striving to understand one another – as well as themselves, what has been and what will be, there is so much about this poem that I find incredibly emotional; the tone, the atmosphere that it creates, the beautiful mention of stars being ‘of memory’ and the linking of music with that memory. But mainly, it’s the bittersweet feeling of it all; the not understanding, the stumbling, and the idea that the past is ‘liable to melt as snow’. Crane’s grandmother, and in particular her library of literature, was a major influence on his life and work, and so it is especially fitting that she be the subject of one of his best works.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

Harold Hart Crane

Crane writes in a more serious fashion compared to Billy Collins poem, "forgetfulness".
Crane writes with metaphores for forgetfullness, and compares lack of movement to memory. Memory being in a progressless state, has created a moment of confusion that the victim can not comprehend, "And it may stun the sybil into prophesy,".
"i can remember much forgetfulness" is irony in it's own. yet the meaning and purpose for writing it can be vague. I could possibly mean about a time(s) when he found himself in that state of mind where he could not remember a fact needing recalling.
"Or bury the Gods" most likely is a metaphor for everyone. that no one escapes the wrath of forgetfulness....

The Broken Tower

The Broken Tower

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My world I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledges once to hope - cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

Harold Hart Crane

“The Broken Tower” was the last poem that Hart Crane composed before committing suicide in 1932, and the poem does indeed have the eerie quality of a poetic last will and testament. Crane suffered from a chronic bent toward self-destructiveness, however, and much of his poetry explored the processes, purpose, and frustrations of the poetic sensibility confronting raw experience head-on in highly charged verbal arenas. The last new poem meant to be published in Hart Crane's life, 'The Broken Tower' (1932) has been widely acknowledged as one of the best lyrics of Crane's last years, if not his career. In keeping with the varieties and difficulties of Crane criticism, the poem has been interpreted widely--as death ode, life ode, process poem, visionary poem, poem on failed vision--but its biographical impetus out of Crane's first heterosexual affair

Written early in the year, the poem was rejected by Poetry, and only appeared in print (in The New Republic) after Crane's famous suicide by water. (Compare his great homosexual love-cycle, ' 'Voyages')

Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge Crane sought to write an epic poem, in the vein of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has been hailed by playwrights, poets, and literary critics alike as being one of the most influential poets of his generation.

Life and work

Hart Crane was born in Garrettsvill, Ohio His father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who invented the Life Savers candy and held the patent, but sold it for $2,900 before the brand became popular.He made other candy and accumulated a fortune from the candy business with chocolate bars. Crane's mother and father were constantly fighting, and early in April, 1917, they divorced. Hart dropped out of high school during his junior year and left for New York City, promising his parents he would attend Columbia University later. His parents, in the middle of divorce proceedings, were upset. Crane took various copywriting jobs and jumped between friends’ apartments in Manhattan. Between 1917 and 1924 he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, working as an advertising copywriter and a worker in his father’s factory. From Crane's letters, it appears that New York was where he felt most at home, and much of his poetry is set there.

Career

Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. White Buildings contains many of Crane’s best lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and “Voyages” a powerful sequence of erotic poems. They were written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner. "Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair.

." Crane’s self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America."

Death

Crane visited Mexico in 1931–32 on a Guggenheim Fellowship  and his drinking continued as he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. When Peggy Cowley , wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley, agreed to a divorce, she joined Crane. As far as is known, she was his only heterosexual partner. "The Broken Tower ," one of his last published poems, emerged from that affair. Crane still felt himself a failure, in part because he recommenced homosexual activity in spite of his relationship with Cowley.

Just before noon on April 27, 1932, Hart Crane jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard. His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899–1932 lost at sea".