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Harold Hart Crane was born in 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio. He committed
suicide by leaping from the deck of a ship off the Florida coast on April
26, 1932.
Crane was never formally educated. He spent the years between 1917 and
1924 in New York It was here that Crane wrote many of the poems for "the
Bridge" which vibrantly depict New York city in a way unique to the
field of poetry. Crane was an avid traveler and spent time in Cuba, Mexico
and Europe. In 1931, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work.
Throughout the body of Hart Crane's work, the reader gets a sense of his
desire to solve the problem of uprootedness. This was an extremely personal
issue for Crane, whose homosexuality made him an outcast in a primarily
homophobic culture, which was prevalent at the time. Crane's six poems
entitled voyages, reflect the short lived union that the author had with
Emil Opffer, a ship's purser in 1919. Unable to find one partner to settle
with, Crane made it a habit to spend his time hopping from one sexual
affair to another, keeping them as anonymous as possible, while treating
his partner violently. In 1932, desperate to fit in with the members of
the artistic community flourishing in New York, Crane settled in with
a woman, Peggy Baird, but this did not last long.
Hart Crane lived a chaotic life, which is reflected eloquently in his
work. Despite the fact that his early work is representative of the great
poets such as William Carlos Williams and E.E. Cummings, Crane's own poetry
eventually took on an idiosyncratic life of its own. It is a combination
of the nfluences of the masters mixed generously with conflicting and
divisive lines which create a tense balance within the forces of his writing.
Crane's unfortunate suicide, brought on by his father's death mounting
financial woes, and his inability to complete the Aztec epic for which
he received the Guggenheim, is a lesson for other poets, according to
many critics. Crane's failure is that he proved that it was impossible
to write a poem that was both rich in social content and engaging aesthetically.
However, Crane is not to bear the entire brunt of this failure. Society
and American culture, even during Crane's time, lacks the center which
such poems are to accurately portray. Despite his influence and obviously
well-crafted poems, Hart Crane is considered by many to be an obscure
poet. I believe that he was a visionary who demonstrated that clarity
in one's poetry was not the benchmark of a psychologically and experiencially
elaborate work worth the time it took to both read it and to comprehend
it.
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2000, 2001 Mocha Memoirs, Inc. All Rights Reserved. No unauthorized duplication
without expressed written consent of Mocha Memoirs.
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