Hart Crane. American poet, one of the great precursors of modern poetry in the English language, for his visionary and at the same time epic intensity.
Career path
From childhood he was passionate, restless and emotionally fragile. He received little education. Later he became an alcoholic, self-destructive and had multiple problems derived from his homosexuality . His father was opposed to him pursuing his literary vocation.
He therefore worked in various jobs in New York and Cleveland , which left him with a very bad impression of city life, a trait that marked his poetry . His first European readings (J. Donne, C. Marlowe, W. Shakespeare, J. Laforgue and A. Rimbaud) were decisive in his way of assimilating the influence of W. Whitman, more attentive to the new American civic sensibility.
His first published book was White Buildings (1926), whose poem “Marriage of Faust and Helen” was a response to T. S. Eliot’s cultural pessimism in The Waste Land, for Crane shared, like Whitman, an idea of history as coherent rather than as fragmentation or irreversible decay. Unlike Eliot, he used the new industrial and urban landscapes to express meanings of positive symbolism.
After the publication of his poetry collection The Bridge (1930), he obtained the Guggenheim scholarship, which allowed him to travel through Europe , Mexico , Key West and the Caribbean , devoting himself entirely to poetry, alcohol and sentimental adventures with men and women.
The long poem The Bridge, his major work, consists of fifteen parts and is inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge: its symbolic meaning modeled in the form of a symphonic structure is the union of the present with the past through the power of creation, which expresses a vigorous vision of the historical and spiritual significance of North America.
On the return trip to the United States he was beaten by some sailors in response to his attempt to seduce them, and the next day he committed suicide by jumping into the waters of the Caribbean.