An ecstatic, visionary jazz lover and verse talent eclipsed by self-induced angst and silenced by suicide, Harold Hart Crane is a literary enigma. His brief show of vitality raises conjecture about his true artistic promise, which flickered to extinction in the last months of his life. Obviously adept at imagery, yet willfully obscure, he allowed profusion to mount into a hopeless tangle, thus ruining his verse. In the evaluation of critic Allen Tate, Crane was a flawed genius, a lyric poet who reached too far for epic grandeur.
Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899. He was an only child whose father, Life Saver candy inventor Clarence Arthur Crane, was too fond of business to nurture art in a precocious son. His parents’ marriage ended when his mother, Grace Hart, suffered a breakdown in 1908. Family tensions and outbursts presaged Crane’s complex battles with manic depression, psychosomatic seizures, and insecurity. In boyhood, he shut out the uproar by retreating to a tower room in the family home and cranking up his Victrola. In his teens, he made two suicide attempts.
Crane began writing in his teens while living with his grandparents in Cleveland and attending East High School; but later he dropped out of school. His first experience with the sea had set him off in his mid-teens to roam the streets in search of spiritual solace outdoors. In New York, he steamrolled friends with a manic gregariousness that approached hysteria. He played the role of poet in an effort to escape his troubled past.
Crane admired sea verse, the metrics of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde’s exotic diction, and Walt Whitman’s urban romanticism, but he lacked the control of his first idol and the richness and forthright expression of the other two. He published “C-33” in Bruno’s Weekly and “October–November” in The Pagan by age 18. Because he was dependent on handouts from family members, he returned to Ohio in despair to work as a riveter, advertising copywriter, candy store clerk, reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and laborer in a munitions plant while he edited The Pagan. Following his first homosexual affair, he alternated between flights of joy and confrontations with blackmailers.
At age 21, Crane made his first cash sale ($10) with “My Grandmother’s Love Letters.” Artistically, he distanced his writing from the precise logic of T. S. Eliot to emulate the ecstatic symbolism of Wallace Stevens. In the postwar era, he rejected his father’s attempts to force him into business. He was his own man at last; he began writing copy for New York’s J. Walter Thompson Agency and continued submitting to Dial. In 1922, he first described the wonders of technology in “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” a preface to the themes of his loftiest poems. Editor Marianne Moore brought him back to earth by rejecting “Passage” and suggesting improvements in “The Wine Menagerie.” Her criticism hurt his feelings and precipitated an infantile tantrum.
In 1925, Crane was still unable to support himself and lived at the New York farm of poet Allen Tate and novelist Caroline Gordon while he worked on The Bridge. With their help, he acquired a patron who advanced $1,000 so that Crane could travel and compose in leisurely fashion. Because he lacked self-discipline and mismanaged money, he drank himself into the gutter, brawled with sailors, and was arrested for fighting.
From 1927 to 1928, Crane lived in Pasadena, California, where he worked as a personal secretary. His advancement suffered from self-indulgence in alcohol and sex followed by bouts of self-pity and abusive language. He changed his residence frequently, which took him all over Manhattan, particularly Greenwich Village and along the East River overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane completed two symbolic poetry suites: White Buildings (1926), introduced by admirer Allen Tate, and The Bridge (1930), a mystical American epic. These works earned Crane Poetry magazine’s Helen Haire Levinson Prize, a 1931 Guggenheim Fellowship, and lasting tribute as a major American poet.
Crane’s surge of critical acclaim came too late to rescue him from ruinous debauchery and fistfights, exacerbated by the disapproval of his family and friends. A failed love affair with Peggy Baird Cowley ended Crane’s illusion of a heterosexual lifestyle. With the collapse of his plans for an Indian epic, Montezuma, he sank into exaggerated paranoia and made a show of suicide by drinking iodine and mercurochrome. Released from jail for disturbing the peace, he returned from a sojourn in Mexico in low spirits, the result of a quickening of intermittent manias.
With a loan of $200 from his uncle for a subsequent journey, Crane set sail for New York with Cowley on the steamboat Orizaba in April 1932. He leaped into the Gulf of Mexico 300 miles north of Havana at noon on April 27. Whether he was frenzied or truly suicidal, no one could determine. His body was not recovered. A comprehensive anthology, Collected Poems, was issued in 1933, followed in 1972 by Ten Unpublished Poems and in 1986 by The Poems of Hart Crane.
