Who is hart crane

Speak-easies and taverns were logical places to seek out sexual companionship. He learned early on that he could return from states of ecstasy with snatches of poetic phrasing that he could not obtain any other way.

In Europe in , falling in among wealthy expatriates, Crane pursued his dissolution. By , friends who had not seem him for several months were expressing astonishment at his premature aging: his facial features losing sharpness and tone, his hair rapidly greying. In April of , he was returning to an America that was ravaged by a financial depression.

His father had died in , in the process revealing just how completely his once-ample resources had been depleted. He was returning to New York City, his Guggenheim fellowship over, knowing that tales of his drunken exploits in Mexico would have preceded him.

His project of an "Aztec epic" had resulted in less than a handful of poems. The one serious work he had recently written in March , "The Broken Tower," was essentially a love-poem, though it tellingly betrayed his longing for a time in the past that was intensely energetic and that now seemed unattainably remote.

Friends were scattered. And Harry Crosby, who had encouraged Crane to finish The Bridge by offering to publish it in his Black Sun Press, had killed himself two years earlier. Years of drink had almost certainly ravaged his physical condition, undermining his ability to control his mental stability.

His leap into the ocean must have seemed one of the few choices he had left. They argued that his failure proved it was impossible to write a poem that was both socially engaged and aesthetically satisfying. Tate maintained that his own "Ode to the Confederate Dead" was successful precisely because of the elegiac tone it adopted, mourning an ideal that was now utterly lost. What poets needed, these critics concluded, was to follow more carefully the advice of critics, and both Winters and Tate followed their own advice by more or less abandoning poetry for criticism.

The cultural epic — the socially-engaged sequence composed of aesthetically self-sufficient lyrics — was pronounced obsolete. Long poems could still be written, but only by representatives of the first generation of modernism — by Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens — who were entitled to continue because of their claims as "inventors" of the form. But critics in the s and s warned young poets away from attempting such work. These warnings were recorded in textbooks and dutifully taught in universities.

But practicing poets were likely to be unaware of such pronouncements. A "Crane tradition" of the long poem continued after his death, though the critical discourse of the academy was designed not to recognize it. Traces of his powerful rhetoric flash through numerous poets of the s, including Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Fearing, and Edwin Rolfe.

Among the poets most powerfully influenced by Crane was Melvin B. Since he first arrived in New York in , the bridge had fascinated him. Over the next several years, Crane dedicated himself to immortalizing the Brooklyn Bridge in poetry. During this period, he survived on donations from art patrons.

He traveled to Europe but was forced to come back to the United States following a brawl in Paris, France. In , Crane completed his epic poem and published it under the title "The Bridge. Using the funds from the Guggenheim fellowship, Crane traveled to Mexico and began to write a new epic poem on Hernan Cortes's campaign against the Aztec Indians during the s and s.

Lisel Mueller. William Saphier. Marianne Moore. Robert Frost One of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, Robert Frost was the author of numerous Her books of poetry include Alive William Saphier William Saphier was a Romanian-born poet and painter who served as associate editor for Marianne Moore Born in , Marianne Moore wrote with the freedom characteristic of the other Modernist poets, He published several poetry collections in the Eliot Born in Missouri on September 26, , T.

Eliot is the author of The Waste Land , which Crane's life was permeated with severe psychic disturbances perhaps originating in this nearly classic Oedipal situation; he eventually became an avowed homosexual and a severe alcoholic. In Crane went to New York, where he held odd jobs to support himself while writing poetry. Later he worked in several midwestern cities before returning to New York in the early s to align himself with the literary avant-grade.

Immersing himself in the study of his American literary ancestors, particularly Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, Crane also managed to become familiar with the experimental verse being published in the "little magazines" of the period and to read the latest works of T. Eliot and Ezra Pound. From until the end of his life Crane received financial assistance from the New York banker and art patron Otto Kahn. Thus he was able to prepare for publication his first volume of poetry, White Buildings Earlier, in , a reading of the Tertium Organum, written by the Russian mystic P.

Ouspensky, had affected Crane profoundly, for it provided what seemed a cogent defense of Crane's own belief in the validity of mystical knowledge based on ecstasy and direct illumination. Ouspensky used Whitman as the chief example of a modern man possessed of mystic awareness, further enhancing Crane's interest in Whitman's poetry. This interest eventually resulted in Crane's most ambitious project, The Bridge , a series of closely related long poems inspired by Whitman's example on the transcendent meaning of the United States, in which the Brooklyn Bridge symbolized the spiritual evolution of civilization.

Crane attempted to build a metaphysical "bridge" between the individual and the race, the temporal and the eternal, and the physical and the transcendent.