Hart Crane: After His Lights

Introduction: Hart Crane Again

Hart Crane spent the night of 26 April 1932 as he did many other nights in his short life. He drank compulsively, and then he sought out sailors who might be interested in quick, no-consequences sex. This time, he chose badly. He received a thorough thrashing. While unfortunate, this outcome was no surprise. He had previously been beaten, robbed, and otherwise humiliated during his nocturnal escapades.1 Part of the pattern, too, was morning-after remorse. The next day he greeted his ¤ancée Peggy Baird with a typically melodramatic declaration: “I’m not going to make it, dear. I’ve utterly disgraced myself” (Fisher 500–1). The setting and the circumstances, alas, were not typical. Crane and Baird were aboard the cruise ship Orizaba, sailing north from Veracruz to New York City. Worse, Baird had suffered a freak accident—an exploding cigarette lighter—that left her burned, bandaged, and temporarily sedated. As noon approached on 27 April, she was still too thoroughly muddled to be much help. Drunk, disoriented, shamed, and cut off from the friends, relatives, and lovers that had sustained him through earlier, comparable crises, Crane impulsively decided to kill himself. The Orizaba was 275 miles out of Havana and following the Tropic of Cancer: Heedless of the curious glances that followed his progress along the deck, Crane walked quickly to the stern of the ship, and scarcely pausing to slip his coat from his shoulders, vaulted over the rail into the boiling wake. The alarm was general and immediate. There was a clangor of bells as the ship’s engines ground into reverse; life preservers were thrown Introduction Hart Crane Again overboard; a lifeboat was lowered.Some claimed they saw an arm raised from the water and others that a life preserver turned over as though gripped by an unseen hand. But the of¤cer in charge of the bridge maintained they had only seen the white disc lifted on a sudden wave. For more than an hour the steamer circled round and round in the quiet blue morning, crossing and recrossing its broad white wake, while the lifeboat crew, resting on their oars or rowing aimlessly, scanned the inscrutable water. (Horton 302) Dead at thirty-two, Crane left behind a slim oeuvre. He published only two books of verse—White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930)—as well as a scattering of uncollected lyrics, book reviews, translations, and exercises in literary criticism. A third book, Key West: An Island Sheaf, stalled in manuscript , and a ¤nal project, a verse drama titled Cortez: An Enactment, never went beyond the initial research phase.2 (All that survives is a single sheet, a mock title page typed on a sheet of stationery from the Hotel Panuco,Mexico City.3 ) He had, however, already earned a reputation as a rising star, the most gifted of the U.S. poets to come of age reading T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and W. B. Yeats. His verse had appeared in such prominent avant-garde journals as Broom, Poetry, the Little Review, and transition alongside new writing by the likes of André Breton, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. The merits of his poetry had been debated publicly by many of the most eminent literary and cultural critics of his day, among them Van Wyck Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Robert Graves, Matthew Josephson, Laura Riding, Allen Tate, and Edmund Wilson. His suicide, moreover, coincided with a particularly dark point in U.S. poetic history. The Great Depression had quashed the little magazine culture that had fostered literary innovation as well as the emergence of new talent throughout the 1920s. Young writers who hoped to rival the accomplishments of the Eliot-Pound-Williams cohort faced “economic hardship” and almost certain “public neglect”; not surprisingly, then, among ambitious twenty- and thirtysomething poets, Crane’s death was experienced as a generational “tragedy”that “struck terror in all but the hardiest”(Bergreen 108). They quickly began turning out agonized elegies with titles like “Fish Food” and “The Suicide.”4 The book selected for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1932—Paul Engle’s Worn Earth—contains a representative sample, the lyric “Hart Crane.” The whole of the world, Engle announces, laments the poet’s passing: 2 introduction the vast General grief of the world, . . . the ¤rst green Thrust of the split seed out of the earth, the burning Fingers against...