“Life preservers were thrown overboard. A life boat was lowered; some claim they saw an arm raised above the water.”
That is from Philip Horton’s report of Hart Crane’s dramatic suicide in 1932. Here “an arm” is an indefinite reference: Horton doesn’t mention Crane’s arm but only ‘an arm’, depersonalising the poet even as he reaches out for help. All attempts at rescue failed, and Crane’s body was never retrieved from the water. His name was inscribed onto his father’s gravestone a year later, appended with the words ‘Lost at Sea’. These tragic biographical details remind us of a poet who, in reading as in life, deserved more attention; a piece of sunken literary treasure.
The son of divorced parents, Crane stood out amongst the modernist scene of the 1920s as an autodidact, having abandoned school at age sixteen in order to travel to New York and begin writing. Add Crane’s homosexuality to his lack of a secure home and educational credentials, and a remarkably marginal figure emerges. Yet throughout his short life Crane wrote poetry of thrilling lyricism and epic scope. He rejected the pessimism of T.S. Eliot, in favour of pursuing “spiritual events and possibilities as real and possible now as in the time of Blake.” To grasp these possibilites Crane fell in love, with Emil Opffer and with the Brooklyn Bridge. Out of these relationships came ‘Voyages’ and ‘The Bridge’, a series of triumphant love lyrics and the visionary long poem to which he had always aspired. Taken together they represent the most challenging American poetry, blazing with rhetorical energy and providing a rapturous alternative to ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Waste Land’.
Written in a style not unfit for the Renaissance stage, ‘Voyages’ invites us to share in the heartbreak and desire that inspired Crane. Better still is ‘The Bridge’, a sprawling and miscellaneous work which reads as a poetic picture book of American life. It fuses everyday speech, jazz and pop culture with Platonic myth, allusion and the most abstract, metaphorical poetics. From his apartment building Crane could see Brooklyn Bridge, and came to view it as capable of uniting all his influences and ideas. Let me conclude by quoting his address to it:
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path – condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Originally published in Varsity
