Hart Crane - 5 Short Poems (1919-1930)

Forgotten Poems #89 || Reissue #6

“Hart Crane was one of the first great American chasers of Rimbauds... he tried to bridge the gulf between modern machinery, [and an] open-hearted post-Whitmanic American idealistic spirit, as you find in Kerouac, and some of the early Melville before he’s totally disillusioned. He tried to bridge that modern machine-America with a classic Neo-Platonic idealistic sense of the universe, a Gnostic spiritualism.” (Allen Ginsberg)

     
              —: My Grandmother's Love Letters :—

       There are no stars to-night
       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 so long
       Into a corner of the roof
       That they are brown and soft,
       And liable to melt as snow.
 
       Over the greatness of such space
       Steps must be gentle.
       It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
       It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
 
       And I ask myself :

       “Are your fingers long enough to play
       Old keys that are but echoes:
       Is the silence strong enough
       To carry back the music to its source
       And back to you again
       As though to her?”
 
       Yet I would lead 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 sound of gently pitying laughter.
     

    
              —: Interior :—

       It is a shy solemnity,
       This lamp in our small room.
       O grey and gold amenity,—
       Silence and gentle gloom!

       Wide from the world, a stolen hour 
       We claim, and none may know
       How love blooms like a tardy flower 
       Here in the curtained glow.

       And even should the world break in 
       With jealous threat and guile,
       The world, at last, must bow and win 
       Our pity and a Smile.
    

    
              —: October-November :—

       Indian-summer-sun
       With crimson feathers whips away the mists,
       Dives through the filter of trellises
       And gilds the silver on the blotched arbor-seats.

       Now gold and purple scintillate
       On trees that seem dancing
       In delirium;
       Then the moon
       In a mad orange flare
       Floods the grape-hung night.
    

     
              —: Forgetfulness :—

       Forgetfulness is like a song
       That, freed from beat
            and measure, wanders.
       Forgetfulness is like a bird
            whose wings are reconciled, 
       Outspread and motionless—
       A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

       Forgetfulness is rain at night,
       Or an old house in a forest,—
            or a child.
       Forgetfulness is white,
            white as a blasted tree,
       And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
       Or bury the Gods.

       I can remember much forgetfulness.
    

     
              —: Cape Hatteras (from The Bridge) :—

       And see! The rainbow's arch—how shimmeringly stands
       Above the Cape's ghoul-mound, O joyous seer!
       Recorders ages hence, yes, they shall hear
       In their own veins uncanceled thy sure tread
       And read thee by the aureole 'round thy head
       Of pasture-shine, Panis Angelicus!
                                                                      Yes, Walt,
       Afoot again, and onward without halt,—
       Not soon, nor suddenly,—No, never to let go
             My hand
                         in yours,
                                     Walt Whitman—
                                                               so—
     

Hart Crane (1899-1932) was born in Garrettsville, Ohio. He dropped out of high school in 1916, and moved to New York, where he later said he felt most at home; “Since then he has been employed as a mechanic, a clerk, a copywriter, etc.” (The American Caravan, 1927)

His work appeared in all the popular ‘new’ verse magazines, such as Bruno's Weekly, The Little Review, The Measure, Broom, The Fugitive, Secession, Poetry, and Transition. He corresponded regularly with numerous well-known poets of the time, including Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, Gertrude Stein, et al. Crane went on to published the standalone collection, White Buildings (1926), and one of the few modernist ‘epics’, The Bridge (1930), intended as a counterpoint to T.S. Elliot's The Waste Land.

Crane was a queer poet and while his poetry was often densely symbolic and difficult to decode, it can often be read through this lens. For instance, ‘Interior’ appears to be about having to keep queer romance secret, as in the lines: “Wide from the world, a stolen hour we claim, and none may know how love blooms.” Similarly, in these lines from ‘My Grandmother’s Love Letters’, Crane may be referencing coming out to her: “I would lead my grandmother by the hand, through much of much of what she wouldn’t understand.”

As queer theorist Tim Dean argued; “The obscurity of Crane's style owes partially to the necessities of being a semi-public gay man—not quite closeted, but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open: ‘The intensity responsible for Crane's particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces a kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy’.” (Dean, 1996)

Similarly, Crane's discussions of male intimacy have often been dismissed, as noted by Julie Taylor, in response to ‘Cape Hattares’ from The Bridge: “The scene thus ends with a key tableau of mutual intimacy [between Crane and Whitman]... Such an intense intimacy is troubling for theories that seek to... situate Crane within a particular kind of modernism. Indeed [some] of Crane’s most attentive readers have sought to deny or dismiss the affective claims that stare us in the face... Brian Reed [for instance] remarks: ‘Crane and Whitman walking off hand in hand reads like the schmaltzy finale of a B-movie romance’. Reed’s comment hints at the embarrassment occasioned by Crane’s intimacy—his reference to ‘B-movie romance’ indicates an assumption that such intimacy is generically inappropriate; that it cannot be incorporated within the modernist purview... [that it is] ‘schmaltzy’, suggest[ing] that this intimacy is too easy, too obvious, to belong to a difficult genre like modernist poetry, and so intimacy and its complexities are conspicuously not read.” (Julie Taylor, On Holding and Being Held: Hart Crane’s Queer Intimacy, 2004)

Crane had one heterosexual partner, Peggy Baird, who had previously been married to poets Orrick Johns and Malcolm Cowley, also a close friend of Crane's. While Crane attempted to stay faithful to Baird, he continued having affairs with men, and sank into a depression. In 1932 they decided to return to New York by sea, however Crane was assaulted after making sexual advances toward one of the crew members, and the following day, heavily inebriated, he jumped overboard and died. While his work was not entirely forgotten, it has seldom received the attention it so obviously deserves.

Crane’s poetic theories have also tended to be marginalised in the history of modernism: “As to technical considerations: the motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor,' which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension.” (Crane, in General Aims & Theories, 1926)

“Much fine poetry may be completely rationalistic in its use of symbols, but there is much great poetry of another order which will yield the reader very little when inspected under the limitation of [requiring] ordinary logical relationships between words... If the poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and logic— what field of added consciousness and increased perceptions (the actual province of poetry, if not lullabies) can be expected when one has to relatively return to the alphabet every breath or two? In the minds of people who have sensitively read, seen, and experienced a great deal, isn't there a terminology something like short-hand as compared to usual description and dialectics, which the artist ought to be right in trusting as a reasonable connective agent toward fresh concepts, more inclusive evaluations?” (Crane, in a letter to Poetry magazine, 1926)

     
          —: For Nana :—
                   (after Hart Crane)
                           by Dick Whyte
     
       like a river
       bellyful      of stones

       unborn        i gather
       all i can

       borrowing the teeth

       of fish, who
       having            gotten
       used to

       the warmth of blood
       leap

       beyond      the banks:

       my mother's mother
       still speaks
                                  to me
       ripe with
                            laughter
       smile               soft as
       rain
       

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