Profile of Hart Crane

This is poetry and the American produced and recorded by station KPFA in Berkeley

California under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center in cooperation with the National

Association of educational broadcasters. This program is a profile of the poet

Hart Crane as seen primarily through a reading of a few of his poems.

The program as presented by Robert Bellew from the University of California at Berkeley.

On the 21st of July 1899 in Cleveland

Ohio was born to Clarence a crane and the former

Grace hocked their only child my son

christened Harold Hart Crane just

33 years later. This boy grown a man committed

suicide by leaping off the stern of the vessel that was bringing him back to New

York from an extended stay in Mexico.

From the literary world there has come an outpouring of analogies and remembrances

unparalleled in the history of this country and comparable sense only to the

impact of the recent death of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

Yet even this testimonial was inadequate to express the sense of loss experienced

by the younger poets and writers particularly for in the few short years he allowed

himself Harold Hart Crane had become a poet who represented in the

quintessence their hopes their aspirations and

their four doomed defeats.

John Donne once wrote No man is an island

of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent

a part of the main.

Now it is one thing to understand this philosophic way it is another thing to

feel oneself comfortably and securely a part of the main

feeling that for most people is the principal legacy from their parents.

Crane's father was a wealthy son of a wealthy family. He was a

successful businessman in his own right. He was impetuous

self-centered and in most things determined to have his own way in his own way.

Official History does not record so faithfully the mother's failings

but it is clear that she was a neurotic woman whose nervous health was fragile

and who could not keep from unloading a good deal of her grief onto the head of her remit your son

in this tug of war. This electric atmosphere air what he

called quote an avalanche of bitterness and wailing

unquote Crane's personality probably started its premature

dissolution.

Hart Crane's father saw him as a child who grew violently ill with

nausea and high fever over such ridiculous causes as a minor

social phobia or slight and as a young man who defiantly

stated he would devote his life to poetry. Now this as a

summary of the character of his only son was something to fill the elder crane with

outrage and his only reaction for many years was to try to break the

boy's will. Conversely crane was

outraged by his father's treatment of his mother and felt no understanding love or

sympathy coming from his father.

Hence it was almost impossible to return any.

At the height of the trouble in 1999 Harold crane had

signalled his total sympathy with his mother by becoming Hart

Crane. It's significant that at the age of 20 the

time of his parents break up he wrote and otherwise rather

juvenile poem called forgetfulness which contains these

lines.

Forget fullness. Why. Why does a

blasted treed. And it may stunned the civil into

prophecy.

Bury the gods.

I can't remember much forgetful mass.

Already the note of Oblivion is struck and already the almost mystical insights

are there. There is the blasted tree symbol of his forever ruined emotional

center.

There is the symbol stunned into prophecy as he was to seek after

and be stunned by the mystical vision. And there is the God of

Barry.

And so it was in a time when intellectually men were feeling themselves isolated.

When Hemingway pronounced his last generation when Dada ism and

other literary movements were invented to express this feeling all no doubt with

some reason but one feels with a good deal of self pity and

glory in the painting. Hart Crane reached his majority

and truly an island began a decade of heroic effort

not to express his isolation but to fuse himself with the

continent of man.

Could he overleaped his immediate parents and find a sense of belonging through his maternal

grandmother who still lived. And toward him he felt a great deal of affection.

Something of that nature seems involved in the poem entitled My

grandmother's love letters.

There are no stasis tonight but those of

memory. Yet how much room for

memory there is in the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough for the letters of my mother's mother Elizabeth

that have been pressed into a corner of the room that they have

brown and soft and liable to Mallard

as snow

over the greatness of such space steps must be gentle.

It is all by an invisible white hair.

It trembles as Burchill limbs webbing the air

and I ask myself Are your fingers

long enough to play old keys that I would echo

is the silence strong enough to carry back the music to its source

and back to you again as though to our.

Yet I wouldn't need my grandmother by the hand through much of what she

would not understand.

And so I stumble and the

rain continues on the roof with such a

sob gently pitying laugh.

Between early stays in New York where he established some of those literary acquaintances that

were to serve so ambiguously throughout his life. He returned for

over a year to Cleveland during which time he made some of his most meaningful

friendships with obscure artists William Summers the painter

whose work Crane brought to a larger attention was won and through Somers.

Ernest Nelson both Somers and Nelson were older man

summers and kept painting despite poverty the long work day family

responsibilities. But Ernest Nelson had been driven by these

forces to quit a very promising beginning both as poet and painter.

The isolation and loneliness and the obscure heroism of Nelson

touched crane. And when the older man died crane wrote

praise for an urn.

One of the most beautiful allergies in American literature in

Nelson he saw combined the eternal sadness of Pyrrho and the

enormous sensual gayety of Robert Lay's Gargantua with a

living wisdom which could survive the storm.

His remembrance of their talks on the meaning of life and death is

ironically commented on in the poem by the clock in the crime of Tory

where Nelson's body is reduced to ashes as a language might

be reduced to its component idioms.

Phrase for an urn in memoriam Ernest

Nelson.

It was a kind and northern face that mingled in such

exile guys the everlasting eyes of peril

and of Gargantua the laughter.

His thoughts delivered to me from the white coverlet and Pellow.

I see now where inheritances delicate

Riders of the star

the slant the moon on the slanting hill once moved toward

present to months of what the dead keep living still.

And such assessments of the soul as perched in the crematory

lobby the insistent clock commented on

touching as well upon our praise of glory as proper to the tie.

Still having in my gold hair

I cannot see that broken brow and miss the

dry sound of the Strachey

cross-eyed usage.

It's a

gathering of the is well-meant Didion's into the Smokies spring that fills the

suburbs where they will be lost.

They are no trophies of the sign.

Toward the end of this period. In the summer of 19 22 the

first of his larger concepts became in actuality a

poem called for the marriage of Faust us and Helen. The

poem was in three sections. In his own words quote I was really

building a bridge between the so-called classic experience of beauty and many

divergent realities of our seeding confused chaos of today

unquote. So that we see once more the effort to connect himself with

some larger human scheme.

It was shortly after this that I began to think of and write some fragments of what

seems in retrospect the inevitable major effort with the inevitable

title the bridge in which Brooklyn Bridge was to serve as the

central symbol of a long poem that was to be as he put it

quote a synthesis of America and its structural identity

unquote. Meanwhile he had returned to New York and in

1924 and 25 wrote the second of his major

compositions the series of six poems called voyages

some years earlier at the age of 16.

A few days after his first acceptance by a New York little magazine

he accompanied his mother to the hart plantation on the Isle of

Pines south of Cuba. Dating from this voyage to the

tropics islands the whole paraphernalia of the

sea and heard his poetry forever.

The sea fascinated him. That great land lessness

that great waste of contained in the form and formlessness of

promise and struck and continued to vibrate throughout his

life the deepest chords of his being.

This series of six poems is without doubt the noblest evocation of the sea in

American poetry.

I shall read the first three sections.

Voyages

above the fresh ruffles of the surf bright stripe and urchins fly

each other with signs they have contrived a conquest for shall shocks

and their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed gaily digging and

scattering.

And in answer to their trouble interjections the sun beats lightning on the

waves the waves fold funder on the sand.

And could they hear me I would tell them

oh brilliant kids frisk with your dog fondle your

shells and sticks bleached by time and the elements. But

there is a line you must not cross nor ever trust beyond it

spry cordage of your bodies to caresses to like

and faithful from none too wide a brass

the bottom of the sea is cruel.

And yet there is a grey wing

of eternity of the rimless

floods unfettered leeward ings Samite

sheet head and procession where no vast

valet would ban.

Laughing the rap inflections of our law.

Hey there see those die a Paisan now

on scrolls of silver snowiest sentences the

sceptered terror of whose sessions Rennes as her demeanors

motion while all about the piety

is of lovers and views. A non-word

eyes bellows off scions Salva dogs tied to the Crocus

last of the stock is in these poinsettia meadows

of higher tides GEOS of islands all my prodigal

complete the dark confessions have a spanish.

Monarch cowhide turning the shoulders why in the hours

and hasten while have Penelas rich man's past superscription

of bent foam and wave hastened while they are true.

Sleep. Death. Desire. Close round one

instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time of seasons clear

and all.

Oh men strode galleons of carob fire

bequeath us to know our foolish one tale is answered in the

vortex of our grave.

See why I spend drift

the die.

Infinit Khan sanguine idiot.

Bad as this tender theme of the view of the light retrieves

from sea planes where the sky resigns of brass that every

wave and thrones Wyo ribboned water lanes I

wind our live then scattered with no stroke wide from your

side to this hour the sea also

had and so admitted through

black swollen gates that must arrest all distance otherwise.

Past where Ling pillars and live had eminence the light

wrestling their incessant play with light.

Stop kissing Stata through wave on wave on to your

body rocking and where death. If she had

presumes no carnage bought this single change

upon the stage. Follow the line from dawn to

dawn the silken skill of the Terrans

member months of song.

Are meant to me a voyage of. Into

your hands.

During the next two years with most of the work being done in two

fantastic surges of creativity he all but completed his master

work the bridge the generosity of the banker auto con was

largely responsible for freeing him for most of this period from earning a living

and the first of his creative bursts occurred on the Isle of Pines to which he had

returned to carry on his writing there for a period of time

roughly the month of August 1926. His creativity

achieved some kind of infinite push of powers and at the end of

that time he had completed about three quarters of the bread plus a number of his

best shorter pieces.

Among them Royal Palm.

Green rustling leaves more than regal charities

drift coolly from that tower of whispered light

I made the known tides of the desperate deeds. I

watch the sun's most gracious anchorite climb up as by

communings year on year on a turn of the earth or OT

and the great trunk that's elephantine and rear it's

frond ings side in a theory will follow

ever through less and beyond that you would have swept the

jungle presses with hot love and tender old have our death word breath

to see it. Graves as the horizons

launched above immortality they are sending emerald

bright our fountain and soul you da crown in view

unshackled casual of its eyes you're at a height as though it's

so hard such wise through a heaven tool.

Not long after his dedicating this magnificent poem to his mother

their relationship began to disintegrate as he realized he was unable to bear

both her agony and his own. After

that he made what shift he could be courageous or cowardly

to cut himself off from her life and succeeded.

Meanwhile his father's second wife had died and he had married a third

time. Hart Crane became fond of his stepmother. He

became a good deal less sure of the relative guilt and the troubles between his father and mother

and his Crane's growing reputation began to convince his father of the validity

of Crane his dedication to portray a kind of reconciliation

with his father took place. His father gave him a small but steady financial

support in these last years.

Though Crane never lost his incredible vitality he is

asked for a living. Nor the magnificent physique which withstood every hardship

his life after 1926 was an accelerated tale of

disintegration.

I said earlier that he was an islander trying to create a bridge between

himself and the mainland of man. Perhaps that was wrong.

Perhaps he spent his life trying to be a bridge first between his

parents. Next between his mother and her sanity.

Next between his talent and an abstract concept of beauty. Next

between the real imperfect America and our noble mystical destiny.

In the end perhaps it was less his failure than that of the

persons and things he tried to unify as if it

Lantus that mythical continent which had for so long intrigued him

had sunk into the welter of water leaving him an abstract

bridge of language in the midst of the sea whose ends

anchored to an old reality.

Out of the mother soil of America the legendary Pocahontas

of Crain's epic poem the bridge out of the fic conduct a

spiritually handed on to the Pioneer Woman from the tragic Indian mother

come such man such signs restless

Wanderers after majestic clouds that looked like mountains

or rather the explorers of mountains

as you said as clouds.

From Part two of the bridge. The section

called Indiana.

The Morning Glory climbing in the morning along over the lentil on its wire a

vibe closes before the DAs

firs in its song as I close my eyes.

And bison founder rends my dreams no mas for once

my room was torn my boy when you did

your first cry of the prairie's dog your father

knew that and though we'd buried him behind as far back on the Gold

trail. Then his last day.

But you who dropped the side to grasp the O.R.

knew not nor heard.

How are we to prodigal once rode off to wave

seminary Hill a gay goodbye.

We found God lavish there in Colorado but passing a sly

pebble sang the fire cat slunk away in glistening through the

sluggard freshets came in golden syllables loosed from the clay his

gleaming name.

A dream called Eldorado was his town that rose up shambling in the Nuggets

way. It had no charter but a promised crowd of claims

to stay but we are too late too

early howsoever one nothing out of 59 those years

but yielded promise yielded to us never

and barren years.

The long train back.

I huddled in the shade of wagon tenting looked out once and saw a bent

westward passing on a stumbling Jade a homeless squaw.

Perhaps a half breed on her slender back

she cradled of Davis body. Riding without

rain highrise strange for an

Indians were not black but sharp with

pain and light twins stock as

they seemed to shine in the gaze of all our silent man the long team line

and two she saw me.

When their Violet haze lit with love shine

I held you up by you suddenly the boulder knew that mere words could not have brought us

nearer.

She nodded.

And that smile across her shoulder will still endear her as

long as Jim your father's memory is warm.

Yes Larry now you're going to see.

Remember YOU were the first before Ned and this farm first

born remember.

And since then all that's left to me of Jim has

folks like mine came out of Arrowhead. And

you're the only one with eyes like him.

Kentucky bred. I'm

standing still. I'm all

I'm half of stone.

Oh hold me in those eyes and gaging blue.

There is rather stubborn years gleam in the tone where

gold is true.

Down the damned Turnpike to the river's edge. Perhaps I'll

hear the mare's hoofs to the far right me from Rio

and you'll keep your pledge I know your word.

Come back to Indiana not too late. Or will you be

a ranger to the end.

Good bye good bye.

I shall always wake you Larry.

Travel light. STRANGER.

Sign my friend.

This profile of Hart Crane was presented by Robert Bellew poetry in the American was

produced and recorded by KPFA in Berkeley California under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio

Center and distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the

NABC Radio Network.