Hart Crane, 1899 - 1932

The poet Hart Crane was born Harold Crane in Garrettsville, Ohio (1899). He's best known for his epic poem The Bridge (1930). His father was the wealthy owner of a candy company, and his parents didn't get along very well. His mother was a terrible hypochondriac, and Crane spent his childhood listening to her complain about imaginary illnesses. He never finished high school, but moved to New York City, hoping to attend Columbia University. They didn't take him. He tried to enlist in the Army, but they wouldn't take him either because he was a minor. He was a homosexual and a bohemian. He loved to drink and pick up sailors in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, though he often got beat up and robbed by the men he propositioned. His father constantly threatened to disown him unless he got a real job. In a letter to his father he wrote, "Try to imagine working for the pure love of simply making something beautiful… then maybe you will see why I am not so foolish after all to have followed what seems sometimes only a faint star." He had begun writing publishable poems in his early teens, but he wanted to write an epic poem like Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" or T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." Every day, he spent hours looking out the window of his apartment at the Brooklyn Bridge, and it gave him an idea for a book-length poem about America called The Bridge (1930). It was his masterpiece, but it got mixed reviews when it was published in 1930. Crane spent his last few years traveling in Cuba and Mexico, drinking and struggling with writer's block. He once threw his typewriter out the window in frustration. In 1932, while sailing on a ship from Havana to New York, he came out on the deck wearing a topcoat over his pajamas. He took off his coat, folded it neatly over the rail, and jumped into the Gulf of Mexico. His body was never found.

To Brooklyn Bridge


How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.