Poet's Progress

HART CRANE: THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN POET--Philip Horton--Norton ($3).

Few modern readers could recall even the name of any 18th Century U. S. poet. Of the 19th Century, only three names are still respectfully remembered: Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson. Of the U. S. poets which the first third of the 20th Century has brought to birth, modern readers could name a dozen who are fairly well-known: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robinson Jeffers, Edgar Lee Masters, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Conrad Aiken. Which, if any, will still be remembered by the 21st Century? Eliot and Pound, heading most contemporary lists, seem fairly safe. Last week another name was proposed for the Hall of Fame; and Proposer Philip Horton seemed sure that posterity would second his nomination of Hart Crane, who led a violent life, met a violent end.

Harold Hart Crane was born in 1899 in Warren, Ohio, only child of comfortably middle-class parents. His mother and father were always quarreling, separating, making up; little Harold was an agonized and helpless onlooker. He was a sturdy child but extremely sensitive. When he was nine his parents parted; his mother went to a sanatorium and Harold was sent to Cleveland to live with his grandmother. Passionately interested in poetry and not much interested in school, he made few friends there; but he landed his first poem (in a Greenwich Village magazine) when he was 16. When his mother filed petition for divorce Harold dropped out of school, was put on an allowance and allowed to go to Manhattan, theoretically to tutor for college. Instead of tutoring, he plunged head-first into Greenwich Village life. By the time he had his next few poems published he had begun to sign himself Hart Crane.

In the next few years Hart Crane got his education: a queer mixture of little magazines, Greenwich Village society and odd jobs. He worked brief spells in a munitions factory, a shipyard, a newspaper office. When he was jobless or in financial straits, which was most of the time, friends lent him money and put him up. A prickly guest, he was always quick to take offense.

Crane's dilemma was to earn enough money to live on and write poetry at the same time. For a while he thought he had solved it, when he made a success as an advertising copy writer. But the better he became as copy writer the less time he had for poetry. Finally he chucked his job, depended thereafter on friends and windfalls. Banker Otto Kahn, when Crane appealed to him, gave him $1,000; later another $1,500. Crane's family and friends. and very rarely a check from an editor, supplied the rest of his income.

In a letter to a friend, when he was 20, Crane first announced the open secret of his life: his homosexuality. At first these affairs were passionately platonic; later they became simply debauchery. He made his vice less & less of a secret, at last even told his mother about it, shortly before their final quarrel. Crane was a homosexual but not effeminate. He was in the forefront of many a drunken brawl: once in Paris it took ten gendarmes to subdue him. Crane went from bouts of debauchery to fits of remorse, wrote his poetry in drunken frenzy, painstakingly rewrote and polished it when he was cold sober. His poems, though more than mere mementos of madness, are often opaque distillations of his emotional ecstasies. The majority of contemporary critics made little of Crane's fury but sound, spoke of his "mannered obscurity, his slightly faked sonority." His supporters hardly helped matters when, like Waldo Frank, they drew a diagram to show how Crane's misty metaphysics could be mathematically graphed. Crane's own idea was that his poems were not so much descriptions of experience as experiences in themselves. He could usually and often did explain their meaning, but unguided readers still feel somewhat mistily the sense of his mighty lines:

And yet this great wink of eternity,

Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,

Samite sheeted and processioned where

Her undinal vast belly moonward bends . . .

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.

O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,

Bequeath us to no earthly shore until

Is answered in the vortex of our grave

The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

As the tempo of Crane's disintegration increased, his poems became harder & harder to write. In his poetry a passionate believer in humanity, in the U. S., a mystical Yea-sayer, Crane in his personal life fell deeper and deeper into despair, felt that there was no longer any place in the world for a poet, cried that he was caught like a rat in a trap. In his increasingly impotent rages he would hurl his typewriter through the closed window, head for waterfront dives to find other rats. To the very end friends tried to give him a helping hand. In 1929, on the strength of his long poem on the U. S., The Bridge, he was given a Guggenheim Fellowship, set off for Mexico to write an epic on Cortes' conquest.

In the two weeks before he sailed Crane blew in the first quarter of his money. After a year in Mexico he had not written a line of his projected poem, but he had become the town drunk of Mixcoac. On the eve of his departure for the U. S. Crane made his first attempt to kill himself, by drinking iodine and mercurochrome. One night, on the boat going back, the watch caught him just as he was about to jump overboard. Late next morning Crane called at the cabin of a friend, said good-by to her, then walked to the stern in full sight of passengers and crew, threw himself into the ship's boiling wake. The hour-long search failed to find his body.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.