A Poet's Poet

Hart Crane lived in fear—the fear that the neglect that he was experiencing was a harbinger of the ultimate fate of his work. "The fear of being humiliated was a daily torment throughout his life," according to his first biographer. Ironically, as he could not have known, and as his first biographer notes, the news of his suicide won for Hart Crane "a larger audience than he had ever commanded during his life." In retrospect it can be seen that the myth of his life, that of the poète maudit (one haunted by the example of Edgar Allan Poe)—alcohol, art, and sexual transgression—combined with his suicide at an early age, was surefire proof against his being forgotten or his poetry ignored. In fact, until the death of Sylvia Plath in 1963 and the astonishing spike in her posthumous reputation with the publication of Ariel two years later, Hart Crane was for many readers the cultural ideal of the American version of the tragic poet dying young. Dropping down a notch in this questionable sweepstakes is not to be scorned if one judges the matter by the scholarly and critical attention Crane and his poems have inspired in the eighty years since his disappearance in Caribbean waters in 1932, coincidentally the year of Plath's birth. Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet, Philip Horton's pioneering biography (1937), was followed by major biographies by Brom Weber in 1948 (Weber also edited Crane's letters in 1952), John Unterecker (Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane, 1987), and Paul J. Mariani (The Broken Tower, 1999), as well as by a group of critical and explicative works, the most useful of which, perhaps, were L. S. Dembo's Sanskrit Charge in 1960, Samuel Hazo's "Introduction and Interpretation" volume in 1963, and R. W. B. Lewis's The Poetry of Hart Crane in 1967. In 2006 the obligatory Crane volume was included in the prestigious Library of America series. Now joining these significant contributions to Crane studies is John T. Irwin's Hart Crane's Poetry, which is not merely a welcome addition to the critical shelf on the poet but the most deeply felt and closely argued case thus far for Hart Crane as not merely an accomplished poet but an impressively learned one at that.

If Crane was as sensitive to the etymological and punning reach of words as the author of this long and hefty study of the romantic poet claims (and the case is compelling), then the reviewer feels authorized to speculate that the Crane statement quoted as the subtitle—"Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio"—is fraught with meaning not only for the American poet (who misspelled the French poet's name) but for his critic and biographer as well. Of course, given the kind of poetry Crane wanted to write and indeed did write, Apollinaire's Paris was the right sort of place for understanding and appreciation, while Crane's Cleveland, which held out more for its kind of realism than poetry, suggested one of the places the poet would cling to even as things went asunder ("an iron dealt cleavage!"—from "Powhatan's Daughter," the second section of The Bridge). Moreover the quotation, so placed, serves as a caption for the photograph on the jacket of Clarence Crane (the poet's father) and Harold Hart Crane (the father's only son and sometime employee in his midwestern candy and restaurant businesses). In the black, white, and gray photograph, the two men stand side by side, facing forward (the son a little shorter than the father). They are similarly outfitted, in dark overcoat, white shirt and tie, and the obligatory gray fedora. Each seems to have his left hand in his coat pocket. Only in what each is doing with his right hand is there a marked and, perhaps, meaningful difference. The father leans securely on his cane, and the poet holds between his fingers a cigar butt, a familiar...