Hart Crane Revisited

...The stormiest sections, "Quaker Hill" and "Cape Hatteras," were written last...

...Crane was spotted once in the ship's wake before he sank...

...The obelisk of plain infinity founders below My vision is a grandiose dilemma— This poignant stanza betrays more self-doubt than his fiercely transcendent poetry usually admits...

...Many people found themselves worn out by his energy, his incessant talk, the overwhelming demands of his emotions (a legacy from his mother...

...A walk across Roebling's masterpiece from Brooklyn to Manhattan becomes, in the poem, an excursion through the American imagination, incarnate in many forms...

...He involved himself in public brawls, and alienated friends and patrons like Catherine Anne Porter...

...But compromise was not Crane's way, no matter how fierce the struggle...

...But it shows, more clearly than ever before, to what heights Crane could rise—and what odds he surmounted to do so...

...While still a junior in high school he began to publish poems in small New York magazines...

...In "The Tunnel," about New York's plutonic subway, the poet encountered a more sinister figure: why do I often meet your visage here, Your eyes like agate lanterns—on and on Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads...

...All this travel interfered with conventional schooling, but allowed Crane to read, write and develop an original style...

...In the Midwest towns of his childhood, as he wrote, "poetry's a bedroom/occupation...

...The use of several timeframes in Ulysses inspired The Bridge, which takes place in present, past, future, history, mythology, and Crane's own life simultaneously...

...CRANE'S LIFE and career began to decline rapidly around the time his great poem was published...

...Unterecker (author of Voyages—the most fully researched life of the poet) portrays Crane as a Faustian character, heroically striving to reconcile impossible opposites...

...The beginning is spoken by Columbus, himself...

...Crane saw our various self-images: Noble Savage, pioneer, aviator, or huckster...

...The reason for his suicide the next morning remains unclear...

...Unterecker enumerates some of the way-stops recorded in the poem: towns across America like Cheyenne, Kalamazoo, Booneville, Memphis and Tallahassee, all rich in historical and romantic association...

...Simon's datings indicate that Crane composed The Bridge in a very different order than the one he chose to publish...

...Shortly thereafter his parents divorced, and his father's financial provisions made it possible for the youth to leave the family home in Ohio and move to the East, where he plunged into the literary world he felt to be his true domain...

...1 n later years, his drinking further exaggerated these traits...

...There are the engineering and architectural splendors of railroads, ships, skyscrapers and, naturally, bridges...

...Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity/be still the same as when you walked the beach/near Paumanok—your lone patrol—"he inquired in the "Cape Hatteras" section of The Bridge...

...Eliot, William Carlos Williams, e.e...

...In many ways he reveled in the freedom they made possible...

...His pessimism is amply j ustified inhisowncase.Butl would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb towards a moral positive, or (if I must put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal...

...Subsequent editions have added some material while preserving Frank's basic structure...

...His multi-faceted personality became confusing: He was demonstrative yet secretive, needy yet independent, homosexual yet with his most powerful ties to women...

...Marvels abound in The Bridge, however organized...

...To celebrate their union, he wrote one last magnificent poem, "The Broken Tower," where he focused his themes of conflict between modem life and Romantic spirit more sharply than ever: And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice...

...Simon's edition of the poems does not gloss over the poet's occasional bombast, plethora of arcane words, or greed to include more than can be contained in one poem...

...Startled fellow passengers, gathered to hear the results of the ship's daily pool, watched as the 32-year-old poet walked aft, folded his coat neatly over the rail, then vaulted into the sea...

...Though he somewhat came to terms with his father, he broke with his mother, who evidently threatened to expose her son's homosexuality to the family after a violent series of quarrels...

...Melville seems to be the presiding genius of "Cutty Sark" (the title refers both to the famous China Clipper, and to Crane's favorite brand of Scotch...

...Besides the three sequences, it contains 70 poems and fragments...

...Though it is not often commented on, I suspect many readers have been reminded of Captain Ahab's Elizabethan rhetoric in Crane's most ecstatic passages—such as his invocation to the Brooklyn Bridge in the closing stanza of "Atlantis": So to thine Everpresence, beyond time Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star That bleeds infinity—the orphic strings, Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge: —One Song, one Bridge of Fire...

...Crane saw the continent's rivers as a vast arterial system connected to the great heart of the sea...

...cummings...

...Sometimes it all becomes too much, but excess suited Crane's genius...

...As this edition demonstrates, he failed most when he tried to be conventional...

...This spectral vagrant, patron saint of drunks, with "retching flesh" and "trembling hands" is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe...

...He wore a topcoat over pajamas...

...During the last years of his life, spent in Mexico on a Guggenheim, the drinking reached epic proportions...

...In Havana, a trivial misunderstanding resulted in Crane's last horrific binge...

...And John Unterecker's biographical Introduction clarifies the goals and misfortunes that shaped Crane's work...

...A chronological arrangement would clarify how much tension existed between the poet's hopeful dream of unity and the broken world he perceived with accuracy...

...The only child of a stormy marriage, he felt torn between his romantic, unhappy mother who demanded all his love, and his father, a successful businessman whose values conflicted with those of the bohemian son...

...The youthful tourist paid loving attention to the mountain ranges: the Ozarks "domed by Iron Mountain" with its "old gods of the rain...

...This complexity fed his densely textured poems...

...As he wrote in one late fragment: I rob my breast to reach those altitudes— To meet the meaningless concussion of Pure heights—Infinity resides below...

...He wrote of The Waste Land, "I take Eliot as a point of departure towards an almost complete reverse of direction...

...Emily Dickinson provided him with the epigraph for "Quaker Hill...

...Simon has also corrected published texts from Crane's original manuscripts...

...He began with the ecstatic vision of "Atlantis," then used it as the poem's conclusion...

...Crane became depressed over what he felt to be a waning of his powers...

...Writers brush shoulders with their creations: Cooper's and Captain John Smith's Indians, Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Melville's sailors...

...His descriptions of America teem with specific and vivid details and textures, yet even this country was, to him, a metaphor of the New Found Land of creativity, where the Bridge is both "harp and altar," a harmony of form and function playing hymns of the imagination...

...Crane was equally out of step with the modernists in his admirationfor 19th century American writers...

...Whispers antiphonal in azure swing...

...Crane's reputation was scarcely affected...

...All rescue efforts proved futile, and the body was never recovered...

...Crane's gift for friendship was as generous as his talent for poetry—and as excessive...

...He gave Aaron Copland the title for his ballet, "Appalachian Spring" and described the progress of the season's northward path toward the "violet wedge/of Adirondacks...

...During his brief, cataclysmic life, Crane completed two small, significant books of verse: White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930...

...Is it Cathay, Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring The serpent with the eagle in the leaves...

...The admiration and scorn he received in his lifetime continued to divide the literary world as it reconsidered his works, andstilldoes...

...Some poets have become famous after death...

...Then, unexpectedly, he fell in love with an old friend, Peggy Barnes, wife of Malcolm Cowley...

...Now, however, Marc Simon has produced adefinitive The Poems of Hart Crane (Liveright, 320pp., $19.95...

...In contrast to Eliot's fragments shored against the ruins, Crane proclaimed a High Romantic connectedness of all things visible and invisible, with artists helping everyone to see this universal interrelatedness...

...Ample notes provide dates of composition, allowing the reader to follow the poet's development...

...Following the couple's separation, Hart and his mother traveled from "Far Rockaway to Golden Gate," with the teenager absorbing landscapes he would recreate in TheBridge...

...Crane and his new love sailed back to the States, hoping eventually to be married...

...After his death aclose friend, Waldo Frank, edited a Collected Poems (1933) that included a partial manuscript Crane tentatively entitled Key West An Island Sheaf, 12 other poems, and 10 examples of juvenilia...

...The modernist philosophy, though, appalled him...

...Crane came to a literary scene dominated by experimenters: James Joyce, T.S...