Product Description
This edition features a new introduction by Harold Bloom as a centenary tribute to the visionary of White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930). Hart Crane, prodigiously gifted and tragically doom-eager, was the American peer of Shelley, Rimbaud, and Lorca. Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899, Crane died at sea on April 27, 1932, an apparent suicide. A born poet, totally devoted to his art, Crane suffered his warring parents as well as long periods of a hand-to-mouth existence. He suffered also from his honesty as a homosexual poet and lover during a period in American life unsympathetic to his sexual orientation. Despite much critical misunderstanding and neglect, in his own time and in ours, Crane achieved a superb poetic style, idiosyncratic yet central to American tradition. His visionary epic, The Bridge, is the most ambitious and accomplished long poem since Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Marc Simon's text is accepted as the most authoritative presentation of Hart Crane's work available to us. For this centennial edition, Harold Bloom, who was introduced to poetry by falling in love with Crane's work while still a child, has contributed a new introduction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

A Reading of"Stark Major"
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R9RGG45QBJ0WW I decided on this (relatively) obscure poem, because, rather than Crane's more famous poems (The "Voyages" series, "The Bridge" or "The Broken Tower"), it was unknown to me until I purchased this book.Also, of course, I found it very striking and lovely, though dark.

Whispers antiphonal in azure swing...
How can I review Hart Crane? He's been part of my consciousness, my whole sense of the possibilities of language and of the English language especially, since I first read his work in the 1950s. At that time, I read him as the fiercest modernist, the wildest adventurer in abstract verbal emotion, yet now I re-read him and find a lapidary conservator of the poetic tradition, rhyming his fervid images in strict quatrains.

None of the critical assessments and explications of Crane's poetry have ever jibed with my visceral/musical response to his exaltations. Yes, he was a tortured soul, tormented by his homosexuality. Yes, he committed suicide. But the vision in his language is far from bleak. It's all a paean of beauty. What I think happened, when he jumped from the ship into the sea that had always been a symbol of overwhelming infinity, was that he lost his religion, that is, his belief in the salvation offered by poetic transformation:

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wing 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...

That's how Crane launches his huge poem The Bridge, with an invocation addressed to the icon of his modernity, the Brooklyn Bridge, and to the city of New York. "Liberty" is of course the statue, and it was the liberty of his choice to write poems for a life that took him to New York. Beyond that hint of my understanding of Crane, let your ears make what you want of it. I suppose Crane is ultimately a musician's poet; like music, his words pulse with feeling that never needs to be forced to be explicit.

In the Tradition
Hart Crane's brilliant poetry continues in the tradition of Eliot's 'The Wasteland,' in that he is interested in exploring the modern American landscape. Crane's poetry pulsates with his passion and tragedy. Frequent themes are his own homosexuality and the coldness of contemporary existence. His work is tremendous achievement in terms of its visual beauty and lyrical flow:

"Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's boneshe saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells."

Hart Crane lived a tragically short life. Fortunately his remarkable work remains.

Kiss of our agony
I'll try to be brief, for we are on holy ground. Hart Crane is among the greatest English Poets; he extends the orphic tradition--he works under the assumption (fact?) that poetry is nothing less than Life staying Death--and not in the tradition of mere "Culture", of elegant verses for elegant people.

Among his few peers, we have Keats, Stevens, Spenser (of the epithalamium), Blake, Shelley, and Shakespeare--yes, I said it and I meant it...at his best, Crane possesses as much daemonic power as Shakespeare. There are others, without a doubt, but rarely will one enounter so much of the concentrated Sublime, of pure poetry in such a small body of work. Some of his final fragments are more True than most of the Qu'ran, the Bible, etc, etc. Like a saint, Crane sacrificed everything in order to give us the gift of his song, including his own life. If he had lived, he would certainly be better known (as if Fame were enough); he might be esteemed our country's greatest artist. My advice, read "Atlantis" until you have it by heart--your life will never be the same.

In short, this is poetry at its highest. A moral force, a religious power, an estatic appraisal of our collective destruction, a hymn to to city, an elegy for birth, a myth for our exiled god, Love, to Whom we must ever strive to know better.

p.s. There is a rumor that the Library of America will (at last!) put out an edition of Crane this Autumn that is likely to be the one to get (my copy of their Stevens is exquisite--it trumped Knopf's Collected Poems, something I never thought possible. So if you want to save your money, you can wait for that & hit the library in the meantime (assuming that your public library is unlike mine, and has something other than than how-to books and unauthorized biographies of Jane Fonda).

The Still Imploring Flame
Hart Crane is the paragon of great American orphic poetry - yes, such a thing did (does?) exist. At a time when American poets were taking the turn inward to represent human consciousness through their style in a way that was immediately familiar to itself, Hart Crane stood on the perimeter of that boundary; unwilling to traverse it, or stand outside of it. It is such that a wholistic mysticism pervades each poem in its irreducibility to the subject or the bystander. Each is, in its own way, immediately personal and declarative. Like Whitman - though I whince at the comparison - the poem proceeds as a profound declaration whose import can only be marked on the fringes of itself as a whole. ... Read more

Product Description
Like Whitman, Hart Crane strove in his poetry to embrace America, to distill an image of America.Begun in 1923 and published 1930, The Bridge is Crane's major work. "Very roughly," he wrote a friend, "it concerns a mystical synthesis of 'America' . . . The initial impulses of 'our people' will have to be gathered up toward the climax of the bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Visionary American Poem
I have been reading the Library of America's newly-published edition of Hart Crane's (1899- 1932) complete poems.The LOA edition includes as well over 400 of Crane's letters to his family, friends, and associates. The LOA compilation of Hart Crane's writings made me want to turn again, specifically to his masterpiece, "The Bridge". I have owned the paperback edition of "The Bridge", reviewed here, for many years.It has the advantage over the LOA edition in being less bulky and in including two thoughtful introductions to help approach this difficult poem.The first introduction is by Crane's friend, the poet and critic Yvor Winters.Winters's article dates from 1932, and it is critical of "The Bridge".The second review is by Thomas Vogler.It dates from the 1970s, when this paperback was first published, and attempts to answer some of Frank's objections to the poem.The reader will need to respond to the poem for himself or herself.But I find both Winters's and Vogler's reviews suggestive and illuminating.

Crane first conceived the project of a long poem on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1923.He worked on it fitfully for six years completing in in 1929.The poem was published in 1930.Crane received financial assistance from the philanthropist Otto Kahn (1867 -- 1934) to allow him to work on "The Bridge".We are forever in Kahn's debt. Crane's work on the poem was hindered by the complexity of its themes and by severe excesses in his personal life.But Crane persevered and was able to realize his project.Crane committed suicide in 1932.A difficult and still controversial work, the Bridge has won an important place in American literature.More than that, it has long won a place in my heart.

Hart Crane wrote "The Bridge" as an answer to the pessimism and despair of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land."Crane wanted to create a vision of hope for modern life and a secular myth for the United States.He tried to do so by using the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge, engineered by Washington Roebling, as a symbol.By coincidence, Crane lived for some years in a small room in Brooklyn Heights from which he could see the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling had also lived in this same room.

In Crane's poem, the Brooklyn Bridge is a symbol of power and industrialization and of the promise it offers to modern life.But it is infinitely more. The arch of the bride, in Crane's mythology, stretches backwards in time to the discovery of America, and further.The Bridge also stretches in space to encompass the continent in its entirety, the West, and, particularly the Mississippi River.The Brooklyn Bridge becomes, in Crane's myth, a transcendent symbol in which distinctions of time and place are oblisterated in a mystic vision of self and of the United States.The myth of the poem is also highly personal, as the poet tries to come to terms with his life. In the journey of the poem, the poet leaves his lover in bed in the morning to cross the bridge. He visits a bar at the foot of the bridge and has a conversation and a drink with an old sailor before he returns home late in the evening on the subway. The poet's refelections encompass, through meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge, Columbus, Pochahontus, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, the machine age, and the poet's own life and attempt to overcome what he describes in the "Quaker Hill" section of "The Bridge" as "the curse of sundered parentage."

Crane's poem begins with a magnificent introduction "To Brooklyn Bridge" in which he announces his theme to "And of the curveship lend a myth to God."The poem closes with the mystic vision of "Atlantis", the first section of the work Crane composed in which he tries to bring his difficult vision to unity in what he describes as a "Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth".Cranes's metaphorical Bridge exists in "Everpresence, beyond time,/Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star/ that bleeds infinity/ ...", as the Bridge "Whispers antiphonal in azure swing."As Crane develops his theme, the mythical Bridge is a call to transcendence, hope and reflection and to human love and the brotherhood of man.

The poem is written in varied styles and passages of beautiful blank verse alternate with colloquial passages and with passages that illustrate the depressed, debased character of modern life that Eliot described in "The Waste Land."Crane tried valiantly to overcome these negative elements in his poem.Crane's own vision included dark, despairing moments, expressed in the "Quaker Hill" and "The Tunnel" sections of "The Bridge" which the final vision of "Atlantis" struggles to incorporate.

Some of the sections of the "The Bridge", particularly "Indiana" and "Quaker Hill" were composed in haste as Crane struggled to complete his poem and are frequently regarded as weak links in the work's grand scheme.Some sections of "The Bridge" lack the immediacy and the sheer verbal beauty of Crane's earlier poems in the collection "White Buildings."

For all its difficulties and its mixed success, The Bridge never ceases to inspire me.It is a difficult and hard-won vision of themythic, the secular, and the personal promise of American life. It was a noble effort. I urge readers of this review to explore Hart Crane's American poem, "The Bridge".

Robin Friedman

not easy poetry, but worth the struggle
I'd suggest reading Samuel R. Delany's essay (in Longer Views) and accidentally catching a program on PBS about Hart Crane after your first read of it.It helped me tremendously.

An epic poem which explores America, "modern" poetic imagery (the Brooklyn bridge as opposed to a tree), Columbus, Whitman, Poe, Pocahontas, and sea imagery.It also contains very bold (for the pre-Stonewall era) allusions to homosexuality, in the typical method of the period which is rooted in gender-neutrality. ... Read more

Product Description
No American poet has so swiftly and decisively transformed the course of poetry as Hart Crane. In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called "the broken world." White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane's masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot's The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day.

This edition is the largest collection of Crane's writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane's letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry. His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time.

This landmark 850-page volume features a detailed and freshly-researched chronology of Crane's life by editor Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University and a biographer of Crane, as well as extensive explanatory notes, and over fifty biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

An Authentic Visionary
"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"

Hart Crane is one of my favourite poets, and this stanza from 'The Broken Tower' represents his essential ethos. He is difficult, sometimes even appearing to be frustratingly impenetrable, but this difficulty is part of his exaltant beauty. For those who put in the effort to understand him, Crane will repay them with an augmented vision of life. He invites us to follow him in the very first poem of this volume, and tells us to "step/The legend of [our] youth into the noon".

'The Bridge' is Crane's epic written in the Romantic tradition, and one can see the influence of Shelley, Whitman and TS Eliot all operating upon his mind. The product of this becomes an astonishing sequence of poems with phenomenal rhetorical power. This collection was finished when Crane was about 30, but he supposed that he would produce his best poetry between the age of 35-40, which means the fact that he jumped to his death in the Caribbean at the young age of 32 was an even bigger tragedy. One is inclined to believe this assertion because of the greatness of his final poem, 'The Broken Tower', but we will have to suffice with what he has left us.

That being said, it was surprising to see how little Crane actually wrote. The poetry in this edition (all that Crane ever produced) does not even reach 150 pages, but the sheer power and quality of so much of it more than makes up for this fact. The remaining several hundred pages in this edition provide a very good selection of letters. Just as in the case of Keats, these letters are highly valuable to any person seriously interested in understanding Crane as a poet and person, while also providiing great ideas on poetic theory and life in general. Also included in this edition are a range of notes and helpful biographies, but one laments the omission of any introductory material that could contextualise all of this material and offer one unfamiliar with Crane some tips on reading him. This edition is still a great one to own, due to the amount of Crane one receives. It is also most impressive that the Library of America can fit so much into one book while keeping it so light and small.

Great Deal!
This book was half what it was at the publisher's web site.It was brand new.We are very pleased with this item. We are also pleased that Crane is now included in the Library of America.

The Last Romantic
Crane may very well be poetry's last great romantic. Though certainly influenced by Eliot's advances in form, he rejected that poet's despair in favor of a grander, more mythic, and ultimately more affirmative vision of the world. (Ironic then, that he would die young by his own hand, while Eliot lived to be much older...). Crane's poetry is dense, soaked in language, shot through with a burning eroticism, and goverened by what he called "the logic of metaphor." Often enigmatic, labyrinthian or just plain opaque, his poetry is well worth the effort one may need to put in to appreciate it fully. And as with any great work of art, one can discover something new with every repeated reading. This is not a book that sits on your shelf collecting dust.

I didn't have time to make it shorter
As an American boy growing up in Normandy, I would sit for hours, homesick, on the cliffs overlooking the Channel, thinking that if the fog ever lifted I could see Manhattan. And I would recite from WHITE BUILDINGS for hours, crying out to the fates that had separated me from my homeland, as Hart Crane had bubbled his way to the bottom of a purple sea some miles away I assumed. "As bells off San Salvador/ Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,/ In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--/ Adagios of islands, O my prodigal,/ Complete the dark confession her veins spell." I hardly knew what I was saying, but some charms really do work and it wasn't long before I was repatriated, mouth first. I hope it's not heretical to suggest that Hart Crane's letters, while never less than interesting and often amusing, aren't that superb, and the book seems padded out in consequence to fit the desired "heft" of Library of America volumes. The Board might as well get used to the notion that not all poets have written thousands of pages, and for every Whitman you get a Hart Crane, who just didn't write very much. Does he deserve a place on the shelf with his 144 pages of poetry? Maybe there are some packing issues I don't understand, but otherwise, sure, throw in four hundred pages of Crane's letters.

Though nothing could really top the exquisite if critical presentation that the late Thomas Parkinson gave to his edition of the Crane-Yvor Winters correspondence, Langdon Hammer is able, through the sheer gift of size, to expand upon what we've had and complicate our hitherto too perfect picture of Crane. Crane's letters to Slater Brown and Wilbur Underwood are the liveliest, perhaps, but women also animate him and a recent biography that excoriated Crane for his misogyny seems sadly off the mark. However some biographers will do anything to create a scandal. One might profitably read through these letters to find out what Crane recommends in the way of early American modernism, his peers, because in general his taste is pretty good (and his dismissals of overrated trash are classics of vinegary invective). Of course he can sometimes gild the lily when praising, say, Harry Crosby's poems in a letter to his putative patron.

The index may be the single most useful feature of the poems + letters arrangement, for the index will help us find what Crane had to say about X or Y of his poems as he was writing them. He wrote, for example, a wonderfully impassioned letter to Otto Kahn, the industrial magnate who financed the writing of THE BRIDGE, outlining the different sections he had already finished and those still in the pipeline. Kahn also helped to finance the Metropolitan Opera, and Crane asks Kahn's help in finding employment there as a copywriter. He had the personality of a basso profundo; I wonder if the opera world would have changed if Hart Crane had been more in it.

A brilliant lyric poet who died far too young
Hart Crane is one of those powerful poetic voices that is its own style and immensely attractive.As others have noted, he was modern for his time, clearly American, and yet full of the great poetic traditions of the English language.His influences are identified directly in his works.He talks to Walt Whitman and discusses Emily Dickinson, Chaplin, Poe, and others.His early death was a great loss to English letters and the American voice in the 20th Century.

This wonderful volume from the Library of America (remember to thank them with your purchases and donations - they are non-profit after all) is more than eight-hundred pages, but only a few more than one-hundred of them contain all of Crane's poetry (including fragments).A few more have some essays and prose.The rest are filled with more than four hundred letters that Crane wrote to his parents, his friends, his literary associates, and others.The letters help us put Crane's work into a richer context, allow us to see some of the published works in earlier states, and make us ache and wonder what might have been if he hadn't jumped off the deck of the "Orizaba" into the Caribbean in 1932.

To provide just one tiny sample that amazed me from "Cape Hatteras" in "The Bridge" (Crane's great work) [the ellipsis in the second line is in the poem]:

Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space . . .
O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind's withers!
There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk
Two brothers in their twinship left the dune;
Warping the gale, the Wright windwrestlers veered
Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spun
What ciphers risen from prophetic script,
What marathons new-set between the stars!
The soul, by naphtha fledged into new reaches
Already knows the closer clasp of Mars, --
New latitudes, unknotting, soon give place
To what fierce schedules, rife of doom apace!

We can hear his lyric voice, see his fresh images, and his ability to form the words into powerful energy.This is the result of great talent married to hard work and a special sensitivity to the language.Harold Bloom call's Crane "our Pindar".Now, I think there is more to this image than the linking of two lyric poets.Most of Pindar's poetry is lost to us.One set of odes is complete, and the others survive as fragments.Even though Pindar died old and Crane died young, we wonder about what we might have had from both if Pindar's work had found a way to survive and Crane had found a way to live.

Some say that it was the oppression society put on Crane because of his homosexuality (bi-sexuality?).However, almost all the homosexuals in Crane's time did not commit suicide, and a fair percentage of the people that did commit suicide were heterosexual.The poet grew up in a chaotic family.Yes, his father became a successful businessman with his syrup factory (he also invented and sold the rights to Life Saver candies for a pittance), but Crane's mother and father fought constantly and melodramatically.So much so that Crane dropped out before finishing high school and moved away to New York.The poet's own emotional life was harsh and prone to self-destructive behavior including alcoholism.After 1927 his drinking became much worse.When you combine the home life that formed his emotional responses with his parents divorcing, his father dying suddenly, his mother's neediness, his failure to produce much work during his year in Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship, the affair with Peggy Baird Cowley (the soon to be ex-wife of a friend), his discovery that the inheritance from his maternal grandmother that had been held in trust for him was gone because of a loan his father guaranteed with it, along with being beaten up aboard ship for making a pass at one of the crew and then getting seriously drunk, well, stepping off the boat into the sea in front of witnesses while exclaiming, "Good-bye, everybody!" isn't as big a leap as one might at first suppose.

But what a loss to us all.

This is a fine volume.The editor has provided biographical material for the people mentioned in the letters, notes on sources, notes for the text (including a fine foreword), and an especially helpful chronology of Crane's too brief life.

Hart Crane is a poet I did not know anything about until I had read Harold Bloom's introduction to his "American Religious Poems".Then I knew I had to get this volume and learn more about this important and brilliant poet.You might want to get to know his work and his life, as well. ... Read more

Product Description
Harold Bloom refers to Hart Crane as a prophet of American Orphism, of the Emersonian and Whitmanian Native Strain in our national literature. This text offers criticism of his work from some of the most respected authorities on the subject. Studied works include "Voyages," "Repose of Rivers," "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge," "The Tunnel," and "The Broken Tower."

This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. History’s greatest poets are covered in one series with expert analysis by Harold Bloom and other critics. These texts offer a wealth of information on the poets and their works that are most commonly read in high schools, colleges, and universities. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Bloom's Hart Crane
I've always wanted to write an appreciation of Hart Crane that began, "In this review the word "transumptive" will not be used. The minute it appears in any critique of Hart Crane I immediately close the book in avoidance of the innundation of the "orphics" and "gnostics" that are sure to follow. Hart Crane never used the word, and it only serves to obfuscate the already difficult, but lucid poetry of Hart Crane." Enough said. ... Read more

Product Description
Crane's first collection of poems, published when he was twenty-seven, displays a prodigious gift already at the height of its powers. Harold Bloom writes of Hart Crane: "Genius is a mystery resistant to reductive analysis, whether sociobiological, psychological, or historical. Like Milton, Pope, and Tennyson, the youthful Crane was a consecrated poet before he was an adolescent." White Buildings introduced Crane's poetry to a public largely unprepared for his orphic grandeur and overt homoeroticism. ... Read more

Product Description
"Nobody yawned when Hart was about."-Malcolm CowleyHart Crane's life was notoriously turbulent, persistently nonconformist, and tragically short. Born in 1899, Crane became one of the most significant modernist American poets, yet his self-destructive tendencies-violent outbursts, massive drinking binges, and dangerous sexual pursuits-came to a catastrophic conclusion when at only thirty-two he threw himself from the stern of an ocean liner into the Gulf of Mexico. This new biography presents for the first time a full, frank portrait of the real Hart Crane, a poet attractive both for his flamboyance and passion for life, and for the magnificent sonorities of his work.Clive Fisher mines every extant document left behind by Crane to recount the intertwined stories of the poet's life: his work and the intellectual climate in which he wrote, his urgent and intractable relations with his parents, and his tortured yet incessant quest for emotional stability and love. The book considers the autobiographical application of Crane's poems and recreates settings in London, Paris, Cleveland, Cuba, and Mexico where the poet found inspiration. Fisher redresses injustices to the reputation of Crane's father, Clarence; reintroduces Crane's important friends and their achievements; and without the constraints that hindered previous biographers presents Crane's promiscuity, positioning his activities in the context of the New York gay underworld of his time. The book also takes up the suicidal tendencies of Grace Crane, Hart's mother, and recreates the scene of the poet's death with fresh material from documents of those aboard the ship. This absorbing biography at last provides an authoritative portrait of Hart Crane, a poet whose remarkable work places him among the most important American writers of the twentieth century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Splendid Biography of a Great Poet
Having read Paul Mariani's excellent biography of Hart Crane some years ago, I wasn't sure whether we needed another telling of the life story of the doomed poet whose fondness for alcohol and sailors contributed to his tragic suicide in his early 30s.

But Clive Fisher's new biography is superb, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wishes to find out more about this brilliant writer's tragic life.

Hart Crane came from a family that gave new meaning to the word "dysfunctional," and the fact that he was homosexual (and self-destructively promiscuous -- "Poor Hart Crane," Ernest Hemingway once said of him, "always trying to pick up the wrong sailor") didn't help matters. He was also one of the worst alcoholics of that notoriously hard-drinking era. It made for a short and unhappy life, but a productive one. Crane wrote some of the most brilliant (and difficult) poetry ever written by an American.

Fisher isn't much of a literary critic, and his attempts to explicate such notoriously knotty texts as "The Bridge" are not notably incisive. But when it comes to telling the story of a tawdry but fascinating life, he does a tremendous job. While much of Crane's literary remains were destroyed by his termangent of a mother after his suicide in an attempt to sanitize his reputation, Fisher has found enough to flesh out the picture of an unhappy, self-educated man with a passion for poetry, alcohol and rough trade into an absorbing, if somewhat depressing, narrative. Mariani's is the shorter book of the two, and I'd still recommend it highly, but I think Fisher's is the one to go to if you want to know what this man was all about.

The book does have its flaws, though. Fisher mentions Crane's famous Greenwich Village meeting with Charlie Chaplin (the subject of Crane's poem "Chaplinesque"), but seems not to realize that Chaplin described the meeting himself in his "Autobiography" and even quoted the poem in full (Fisher's bibliography doesn't list Chaplin's book). Also, on page 193 Fisher inaccurately refers to Chaplin's film "A Woman of Paris" as "A Woman of Darkness."

These minor caveats aside, however, I would recommmend this book to anyone who is curious about the life and work of one of America's finest poets. ... Read more

Product Description
Few poets have lived as extraordinary and fascinating a life as Hart Crane, the American poet who made his meteoric rise in the late l920s and then as suddenly flamed out, killing himself at the age of thirty-two and thus turning his life and poetry into the stuff of myth. The first biography of Crane to appear in thirty years, The Broken Tower reads with all the drama of a psychological novel and the inexorable force of a Greek tragedy.Amazon.com Review
In addition to several volumes of poetry, Paul Mariani hasalso written biographies of major 20th-century American poets: WilliamCarlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. In his fourthbiography, he takes on the life of Hart Crane (1899-1932), acontemporary of Williams who held a similarly pivotal role in thedevelopment of American literature's avant-garde. "It would bedifficult," Mariani suggests, "to find a serious poet or reader ofpoetry in this country today who has not been touched by something inHart Crane's music." (However, at the time, many critics--with some ofwhom he had strained personal relationships--did not evaluate his workso highly, which contributed in part to Crane's dramatic suicidal leapoff a ship at sea.) Crane loved New York, moving there from hishometown of Cleveland as soon as he could; even when financial straitsforced him to return home to work for his father, the "whitebuildings" of Manhattan loomed in his imagination. The BrokenTower does a fine job of recreating the passionate energy andvitality of Crane's life. Mariani weaves lines from Crane's lettersand poems into his narrative throughout, and while he does not skimpin his accounts of the poet's alcoholism and promiscuous sex life withother men, he treats these matters simply as components of the poet'scomplex personality. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Looking at Crane
Mariani, Paul L. "The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane", W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Looking at Crane

Amos Lassen

Hart Crane has always been one of my favorite poets and had it not been for a conversation with a friend yesterday, I would have forgotten that I had read this incredible biography but had never reviewed it. Paul Mariani has written biographies of several poets but his biography of Hart Crane is really special because he looks at Crane's homosexuality and then writes about how it influenced his poetry.
Mariani's biography takes us into parts of Crane's life that other biographers have not touched. The author interviewed many who knew Crane and he had access to Crane's letters. We learn about the poet's complex relationship with his parents, especially his father (the inventor of Life Savers candy), who up until now has been written about as a "stereotypical philistine". Mariani also enlightens us about the last months of Crane's life and the heterosexual affair that he had and that tormented him. Crane was brilliant but he was also tormented. Mariani does not avoid Crane's sexuality and alcoholism and shows us that Crane's self-destructiveness is seen in his writing.
The poetry of Hart Crane (1899-1932) is glorious but his life was one of torment. His parents were not happily married and when they divorced, Crane stayed far from his father and then later he did the same with his mother. He wrote his best work in his twenties when he had financial problems and then a bit after that, he went to the bottle and anonymous sex with sailors. He ultimately took his own life by throwing himself into the Atlantic Ocean and his body has never been found. Crane's life is a compelling story, and Mariani tells it to us with depth and psychological acuity.
Few writers have lived such an extraordinary and fascinating a life as Hart Crane; he rose quickly and fell quickly and at the age of 32 he was dead. His poetry lives on and now so does his life with Mariani's wonderful biography. Crane became a major figure in American literature and his reputation continues to grow and his life is legendary. Hart Crane left an unhappy home at the age of 17 to live in New York City and follow his dream to become a poet. With no formal education, he had to rely on his own gifts and he quickly became very important on the New York City literary scene. His first book, "White Buildings", is a collection of short, difficult poetry. While his second book, "The Bridge", is a lengthy poem in which he used the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol and he presents a highly personal and mystical look at America, its past and its future. He lived a life of excess and in his later years he became violent and self-destructive. He was jailed on several occasions in New York, Paris, and Mexico. Near the end, he did have what appears to be his only heterosexual relationship with Peggy Cowley, the divorced wife of the critic and publisher, Malcolm Cowley. Crane committed suicide when he returned with Peggy Cowley from Mexico in 1932 by jumping off the deck of a ship. He was just 32.
Crane's literary output was not large but even so many of his poems are part of the treasures of American literature. Mariani gives us a good account of Crane. His life and his world but it is certainly not definitive as we are constantly learning more about Crane. If I have to name a problem with the book it is that Mariani has not drawn on the existing collections of the papers of Crane's closest friends and associates--Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters and Gorham Munson, individuals appear here only through Crane's eyes. On the other hand, Mariani does explain in a sympathetic light about Crane's sexuality, and he makes a convincing case for Crane as one of the greatest American poets of the century. Crane's poetry is not easy, but certainly worth the effort of reading and this fascinating examination of Crane's writing in the context of his troubled life is revealing. We see the creation and legacy of a poet and Mariani excellently well describes the poems and shows how they were the output of Crane's troubled life.

At critical moments, difficult to grasp
When Mariani gets deep into discussion of particular poems, his language often becomes so compressed and allusive that it reads like a diary of Mariani's own history with Crane's poetry. And like many diaries, it is simply not understandable to an outsider.

I expect that Mariani does not want to reduce the richness and complexity of Crane's work, and this is admirable. I also think that perhaps he expects his readers to have read at least one of the earlier biographies of Crane. And perhaps an English Ph.D. would follow more of Mariani's un-explicated allusions than I did (though I have done some graduate work in English). But I was often frustrated by this book, because while Mariani clearly knows a great deal about Crane's work and its literary and biographical contexts, he often fails to explain what he knows in a way that can be understood.

A Late American Romantic
In a short, wild, and mostly unhappy life, Harold Hart Crane (1899-1932) became -- Hart Crane -- a major figure in 20th Century American poetry whose reputation has grown with time.His life became the stuff of legend.Hart Crane left an unhappy home at the age of 17 to live in New York City and follow his dream to become a poet.Without any formal education -- he did not finish high school -- he used his inborn gifts and wide reading to quickly become important to New York's literary culture and community.His first book, White Buildings, is a collection of short, difficult imagistic poetry.His second book, The Bridge, is a lengthy poem offering a mystic, highly personal account of America, its past and its future, using the Brooklyn Bridge is its chief symbol.

Crane's life was one of excess.From late adolesence, Crane drank heavily.He spent a great deal of time in underworld sex picking up sailors in the harbors of New York, all the while trying to conceal his sexual identity from his parents.Towards the end of his life, his behavior grew increasingly violent and self-destructive.He was jailed on several occasions in New York, Paris, and Mexico.Near the end, he did have what seems to be his only heterosexual relationship with Peggy Cowley, the divorced wife of the critic and publisher, Malcolm Cowley.Crane committed suicide when he returned with Peggy Cowley from Mexico in 1932 by jumping off the deck of a ship.He was all of 32.

Published in 1999, Mariani's biography commenmorates the Centennial of Crane's birth.It gives a good detailed account Crane's life.The poetic focus of the book is The Bridge. (some critics see White Buildings as the stronger, more representative part of Crane's work.) Mariani showshow Crane conceived the idea of his long poem and how he worked on it fitfully over many years.He also shows the difficulty Crane had in completing the work at all -- given his alcoholism. sexual promiscuity, difficulty in supporting himself, and bad relationship with his separated parents.But complete the work Crane did.It presents a mythic, multi-formed vision of the United States stretching from the Indians to our day of technology.There is much to be gained from this poem.I have loved it for many years and Mariani's discussion of the poem and its lenghty creation is illuminating.

Crane was a romantic in his life and art.Frequently, Mariani refers to him as the "last romantic", but this is an overstatement.I was reminded both by Crane's dissolute life and by his work of the beats -- particularly of Kerouac -- and the vision of America that they tried to articulate. With a Whitman-type vision of a mystical America encompassing all, the beats share and expand upon the romanticism of Hart Crane.

Mariani's book covers well Crane's tortured relationship with his parents.It includes great discussions of literary New York City and of Crane's friends.It shows well how Crane was captivated by New York.We see Crane going back and forth between Clevland, New York, Paris, Mexico and Hollywood in a short overreaching life.But most importantly, we see the creation and legacy of a poet.Mariani does well in describing the poems and in reading these difficult texts in conjunction with the poet's life and thought.

Crane's literary output was not extensive.Several of his poems are part of the treasures of American literature.These poems include, for me, "Voyages" (a six-part love poem from the White Buildings collection), "At Melville's Tomb" and other lyrics from White Buildings, The Broken Tower, Crane's final poem, and, of course The Bridge.

Mariani gives a good account of Crane.As with any biography of this type it is not definitive.I hope it will encourage the reader to explore and reflect upon Crane's poetry and achievement.

Crane without the closet
An extremely well written biography of Hart Crane, America's first great modern poet, recreates a fascinating time in the US when the artists of New York lived in cold water flats and drank prohibition liquor (Crane seems to have drank the most). The author deals with Crane's homosexuality as an integral part of his art (as it should be) which apparently has not been the case up until now. My only complaint is that there is too much made up dialogue between Crane and his friends. After awhile you begin to feel you have entered the land of fiction instead of biography. The author presents Crane's horrible relationship with his tyrannical father as the cause of much of his short life's misery.

"And so it was, I entered the broken world."
I arrived at Mariani's 1999 biography after first revisiting his subject's poetry in THE COMPLETE POEMS OF HART CRANE (2000).As a literature student in college, I sometimes confused Hart Crane (1899-1932) with Stephen Crane (1871-1900), the author of THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE (1895).After reading Mariani's memorable biography, however, I doubt that I'll ever confuse the Cranes again.

Crane's life, Mariani observes, is "the stuff of myth" (p. 424).Crane lived in a "broken world," and was haunted with demons throughout his short life.He was the child of a troubled marriage, and spent "twenty-five years . . . quibbling" with his parents incessantly (p. 324), before being rejected by his "hysterical" and "nagging" mother (p. 301).Along the way to his rise as a poet in his twenties, Crane was a "slave" to one miserable job after the next (p. 67), and a voracious reader (p. 62).Mariani's book follows Crane, struggling with his writing, and "living the life of the roaring boy, drinking nightly and cruising the Brooklyn and Hoboken docks after sailors, only to jump from a ship at the age of thirty-two" (p. 424).

Eugene O'Neill, E. E. Cummings, Charlie Chaplin, Garcia Lorca, and William Carlos Williams make appearances in Crane's biography, and there are "shadows," too, in the "broken tower" of his life--Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hopkins, and "Brother Whitman."

Crane's poetry is not easy, but worth the effort, and this fascinating examination of Crane's writing in the context of his troubled life is revealing.

G. Merritt ... Read more

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With his suicide in 1932, Hart Crane left behind a small body of work - "White Buildings" (1926) and "The Bridge" (1930). Yet, Crane's poetry was championed and debated publicly by many of the most eminent literary and cultural critics of his day, among them Van Wyck Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Robert Graves, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson. "The Bridge" appears in its entirety in the "Norton Anthology of American Literature" and Crane himself has been the subject of two recent biographies. In "Hart Crane: After His Lights", Brian Reed undertakes a study of Crane's poetic output that takes into account, but also questions, the post-structural and theoretical developments in humanities scholarship of the last decade that have largely approached Crane in a piecemeal way, or pigeonholed him as representative of his class, gender, or sexual orientation. Reed examines Crane's career from his juvenilia to his posthumous critical reception and his impact on practicing poets following World War II.The first part of the study tests common rubrics of literary theory - nationality, sexuality, period - against Crane's poetry, and finds that these labels, while enlightening, also obfuscate the origin and character of the poet's work. The second part examines Crane's poetry through the process of its composition, sources, and models, taking up questions of style, genealogy, and genre. The final section examines Crane's influence on subsequent generations of American poets, especially by avant-garde literary circles like the New American poets, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, and the Beats. The result is a study that complicates and enriches our understandings of Crane's poetry and contributes to the ongoing reassessment of literary modernism's origins, course, and legacy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Understand the Philosophy of Art
I read this book for a graduate seminar on the philosophy of art.Dabney Townsend's "Aesthetics, Objects, and Works Of Art" is an excellent text to get a general idea of the vast field of philosophy of art.Aesthetics = philosophy of Art, thinking about art.Originally, aesthetics just meant "sense experience," and had nothing to do with art.A certain theory of art came to co-opt this word.So, much of modern philosophy of art turned more to the subject and away from the object because modern science did such to convince us that the objective world could be understood as a precise matter of mathematical physics.This idea became so impressive that people were making claims about art or ethics similar to science, that we can't make any objective claims about the world, we are simply making claims about human beliefs.So, the turn to the subject becomes common because of the success of modern science it co-opted the discussion of objective nature.We say things about art, but not all are true.The Ancient Greeks had absolute beliefs about art like "beauty."

Townsend finds that how we engage art today is different then how the ancient Greeks did, art was embedded in a cultural context for them.Art was not in museums or in dance halls.Art is in a special zone of experience today in museums, etc.Tragedy for Greeks was part of their politics and religion, sculpture and painting the same way.Music until recently, (after the enlightenment) was for religion or some kind of official function.

Philosophy tries to come up with theories about art; it may be a fool's errand.A set of principles that define and illuminates or explains the full measure of art is probably not attainable.
However, just because a theory is wrong doesn't mean it has no value, we can draw import from all of them.Thus, Townsend asks, can art even satisfy necessary or sufficient conditions?One will always find exceptions.

A "Necessary condition" is a condition that must be present in order to account for the subject in question, i.e., all art must have X."Sufficient conditions" are considered to being all that is needed to be in account for the subject in question.Another word a complete sufficient condition means you have captured all that you need to account for.An example of a necessary condition and necessary conditions need not be sufficient conditions, so for instance a necessary condition for "being a bachelor is being a male," but it is not a sufficient condition because you have to have an "unmarried male" in order for it to be a sufficient condition for being a "bachelor."So both "unmarried and male" are necessary conditions, they both must be present in order to account for "bachelorhood," but neither one alone is a sufficient condition because it is not enough.So, when we are trying to define art and one finds some necessary conditions like some kind of "human intervention" that is a necessary condition, but maybe it is a sufficient condition if we want to understand or distinguish between a baseball player digging into the batters box, which is intervention and human manipulation but do we want to call making a divot in the batters box art?Anything having X is art.Relevant condition is useful for art.It is really not necessary to have necessary or sufficient condition for art.A relevant condition is like "beauty."X is significant for art, but not necessary or sufficient.

Terms for knowledge- These are hard to satisfy in the field of art.Therefore, an objective truth is something that is independent of human beliefs, interests, and desires.Subjective truth is something that is dependent on human beliefs, interests, and desires.Subjectivism-Knowledge, meaning, or truth in art is only function of individual beliefs, interests, desires.Hermeneutics- neither independent objectivity nor independent subjectivity; a circular relation between artists, artworks, and art world (audience).All three work together.

Townsend shows how "traditional art theories try to give necessary and sufficient conditions.

Imitation- means it copies something in the natural world.Art refers to some objective reality outside the mind and artwork.(Plato, Aristotle)..Sometimes the imitation theory is also known as the "representational art theory" because the artwork represented something in the world but is not a simplistic idea of copying.The art forms that are most representational are representational sculpture, painting, and drama.The background and implications of the imitation theory first originated in ancient Greece.The imitation theory is the traditional theory that held sway with artists and philosophers up into the eighteenth century Romantic period in Europe.In order for one to fully grasp the meaning of the imitation theory, it is necessary to understand the nuanced meaning of the Greek word for imitation.The Greek word for imitation is mimçsis; thus, art is the imitation of nature for the Greeks.However, mimçsis is a very complex word with many nuanced meanings.It can also mean a representational copy.Plato uses it in speaking of painting.For example, if a Greek painter painted a bird that looked bird like, that would be a sense of mimçsis.Aristotle says art is an imitation of nature, but not just "copying" it.Aristotle does not mean that when art does what it does it reproduces a natural thing.Rather, what Aristotle means is that art impersonates the power of nature to produce something.Human art does something along the lines of what nature does which is very different.Nature produces a tree from out of its power of generation without any intervention from nature, a builder produces a house out of materials which requires the intervention of an agent; however, Aristotle sees no fundamental bright line between those two examples (Townsend 67-58).

The "Expression theory" refers to something going on in the human mind.Art refers to some subjective reality of the human mind, such as ideas, feelings, and cognitive faculties.(Kant, Schopenhauer).The expression theory is the prime competitor to the imitation theory.The expression theory is a modern phenomenon that turns to the subject.This theory became prevalent with the rise of the Romanticism movement of the nineteenth century.With the expression theory--a shift takes place from the objective outer world of the imitation theory to perception of the mind the subject of the expression theory.Expression theorists expect artworks will produce certain human emotions in the audience.Thus, the expression theory has a certain power in focusing on the mind of both the creator and the audience.Expression theorists argue that the theory has a certain power in being able to articulate the communicative and educative power of the mind (Townsend, 79).

For example, the artist has an experience that the rest of us have not noticed.Then the artist tries to express this experience in the artwork, which she hopes will transmit to the audience so they can share the artist's experience.The idea in the expression theory that artworks have an educative power is central to Robin Collingwood's theory.The whole idea is that the artist is some kind of educator and the artwork becomes some kind of educational vehicle for people.Of course, art can have so much power in this regard, as in the case of Shakespearean tragedies like Macbeth.Thus, the expression theory gives artwork a new importance, especially in the medium of the written word, since it purports that artworks like literature are something we can learn from that we cannot do any other way.

Contemporary Art Theory
The "Historical artworld," Art involves an interrelated complex of artists, artwork, audience, artworld/institutions.All these work in concert with each other, and changes through history adds even more fluidity.This complex changes through history, reflecting a tension between normalcy and creativity (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer).

The features and significance of the historical artworld theory, which more properly should be termed a "notion," is that it does not "locate" art in any one of the four traditional factors of artist, artwork, audience, and artworld institutions that people have traditionally examined to define what art is.The historical artworld notion expands beyond the traditional four factors and takes into account history, and the tension between creativity and normalcy.Thus, the historical artworld notion looks at art through a more broad interpretation then the imitation and expression theories do, by adding history and the tension between creativity and normalcy as well.Thus, the historical artworld notion is better at explaining the fluid relationships between the various facets involved in art.The idea is that it uses "hermeneutics" which means "interpretations" that are in Martin Heidegger's words more "world disclosive."Therefore, the historical artworld notion tends to be less dogmatic than a theory and really seeks to serve as a guidepost for understanding art (Townsend 162-163, 170).

One of the most significant features of the historical artworld notion, unlike the imitation and expression theories, is that as Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer argue, the theory of hermeneutics purports that it is impossible to approach anything independent of historical influences that have already shaped us and therefore, mold how it is we would approach anything.There are already operating influences in how we regard anything in the world, and art would be included in that.By contrast, the imitation theory is too "narrow" in its "accepted rules" of art because it only seeks to imitate objects in the world and disregard the importance of historical influence in creating artworks.One of the ways to understand this is by examining child development.Every adult has been a child, and every child has been shaped by cultural influences through all sorts of ways, education, rearing, etc.In other words, any human self will always be equipped with ways of seeing; therefore, there is no such thing as coming to see something as all by itself.Thus, when we approach a work of art, before we even engage it we are already equipped with inheritances from our tradition and our culture that come to us by way of education and other kinds of influences.No engagement with a work of art is a blank slate-- we are not a tabula rasa.For example, in the case of Greek tragedy, we would have to know what the historical circumstances were and what it was like for the work to be performed at that time.Therefore, any approach to art always carries the art history with it, because historical influences are always shaping how we begin to see anything (Townsend, 162).

I recommend this work for anyone interested in philosophy, philosophy of art.
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This study moves through a close, careful reading of each poem, utilizing linguistic, tabular, and literary historical approaches to build an overall assessment of the collection as a series of experimental transformations, fused experiences, and poetic chronicles. Paying detailed attention to the relationship between formal experimentation and biographical experience, the study presents a poet dedicated to the search for appropriate techniques with which to encapsulate the fleeting experiences of life, a worthy continuer of the tradition of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Pound, and T.S. Eliot. ... Read more

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When Hart Crane's epic poem The Bridge was published in 1930, it was generally judged a failure. Critics said the poet had unwisely attempted to create a mystical synthesis of modern America out of inadequate materials. Crane himself, who committed suicide in 1932, did little to correct this impression; and although the poet's reputation has fluctuated over the past fifty years, many people still find The Bridge unsatisfactory. In this analysis of Crane's long poem, Paul Giles demonstrates that the author was consciously constructing his Bridge out of a huge number of puns and paradoxes, most of which have never been noticed by Crane's readers. Dr Giles shows how Crane was directly influenced by the early work of James Joyce; how the composition of The Bridge ran parallel to the first serialisation of Finnegans Wake in Paris; and how The Bridge is the first great work of the 'Revolution of the Word' movement, predating the final published version of Finnegans Wake by nine years. ... Read more

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