The Life of Hart Crane

By Joe Harris

            Poet Hart Crane writes about many different topics.  Especially America and poets such as Whitman and Sandburg inspire him.  Things and people in the world around him inspire Crane.  Crane also writes about fiction, but almost all of his poems seemed to have America at the center of intense feelings.  He loves America, so, many of his poems have an American theme.  He writes about his gay love affairs in many of his poems.  In one particular poem, called “Voyages”, he writes about a sailor that he had an affair with.  One of his most famous poems, “the Bridge” is an example of the way he writes.  Crane writes very abstractly, this particular poem starts out about a bridge then turns into “a mystical synthesis of America.  History and fact, location, etc., all have to be transfigured into abstract form that would almost function independently of its subject matter.”  His titles match somewhat of the writing in his poems, but all of his poems are about a topic like a bridge, or a letter, or a “Black Tambourine”, but he turns the poetry that he writes about them into some greater meaning.  For instance, he wrote a poem about palm tree, “the Royal Palm”, that describes a palm tree and at the same time, it talks about life.  You can read his poems in 3 different ways and each time that you read them, you will interpret it in a totally different way than the first time.  That is what is so great about his poems.

            Hart Crane looks for inspiration everywhere in his life, but not many of his poems relate back to his childhood.  Crane was born in a small town in Ohio called Garrettsville, in July 18, 1899.  His father was a candy maker and his mother scrubbed floors.  His parents had many quarrels and did not get along very well at all.  They broke up and got back together many times until they finally divorced in 1917, this caused Mrs. Crane to spiral down and become a lonely soul as well as Mr. Crane.  This also caused Crane’s life to spiral down, he never attended high school or college, and he had no social life.  He couldn’t get a job so he left Garrettsville.  After the divorce, Crane moved to New York, at least until his money ran out, then he would move back into Garrettsville to get more money, He moved back and forth from these two towns until he finally settled down in New York.  When he settled in New York he had many love affairs with men that inspired one of his poems.  After he moved to New York away from his divorced parents, his poetic career exploded.  This is where crane really found his inspiration as a poet.  He saw everything as inspiration for a poem, “bridge, sea, river, ash”.      

HART CRANE'S PUBLISHED WORKS 

"White Buildings (1926), his first collection of poems, was inspired by his experience of New York City. His most ambitious work is The Bridge (1930), a series of closely related long poems on the United States in which the Brooklyn Bridge serves as a mystical unifying symbol of civilization's evolution."