Customer Reviews

Complete Poems of Hart Crane

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Crane may very well be poetry's last great romantic. Though certainly influenced by Eliot's advances in form, he rejected that poet's despair in favor of a grander, more mythic, and ultimately more affirmative vision of the world. (Ironic then, that he would die young by his own hand, while Eliot lived to be much older...). Crane's poetry is dense, soaked in language, shot through with a burning eroticism, and goverened by what he called "the logic of metaphor." Often enigmatic, labyrinthian or just plain opaque, his poetry is well worth the effort one may need to put in to appreciate it fully. And as with any great work of art, one can discover something new with every repeated reading. This is not a book that sits on your shelf collecting dust.

This collection of Crane's work is a poetry lover's dream. Without going into a critical analysis, (an excellent example is included in the forward of the book) I found his work engaging both intellectually and emotionally. Perhaps one of the most human and honest of poets, from his early work to his last poem, "The Broken Tower", his imagery is consistently refreshing, stimulating and, ultimately, very moving. Of particualr note are the lesser known poems of his youth. They are perhaps the most accessible to readers unaccustomed to poetry of this depth and density. "The Hive" is a wonderful expression of his own struggle as an artist. Also, the series "Voyages", written about his love affair with Emil Opffer, is a beautifully rendered poem using the power of the sea as a metaphor for their love. For readers familiar with the first edition, I found the new introduction a bit too dry and analytical. The original intro told more of Crane's life and the human struggles he went through and explained more about his suicide. I found that to be an invaluable guide to understanding much of what he expresses in the poetry. The new hardbound edition is beautifully layed out and gives justice to the sensitive work within it.

In his poem "Voyages", from White Buildings, Hart Crane's poetry can be seen in a microcosm: seascapes, youth, time, incredible imagery and language in free verse form; and Love, both personal & cosmic. Crane is huge. He is also an acquired taste, and can be quite demanding to decipher. I've found myself having to re-read his poems multiple times, from different perspectives before grasping their sense. And even then, the "meaning" can be illusive. But this complete collection of his work by Marc Simon includes an insightful introduction by John Unterecker which helps put Crane's life and work into perspective. The singular fault with this book is that Simon's end-notes don't offer any insight into the poems themselves, and so the reader is left to fend for himself. On the one hand this is good in that it encourages self-reflection, and arriving at one's own interpretations. Many of his poems can and should be taken at face value. On the other hand, with Crane, sometimes there is more than meets the eye (i.e. In "Chaplinesque" one should know the Chaplin film, "The Kid" to fully understand the kitten image, and there are many allusions in "The Bridge" and other poems which a reader ought to familiarize himself with at some point) and so, having some literary criticism or background available is very helpful. I highly recommend Warner Berthoff's, "Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction" (University of Minnesota, 1989).

Reading Hart Crane is rewarding, and enjoyable. It's a voyage in itself, full of twists and turns, sounds, objects, colors, senses, places, times, language, and history. "The Bridge" is his acclaimed epic, about the Brooklyn Bridge and America, and a must read for those interested in American poetry. Crane was definitely influenced by the revolutionary 19th century French poets Rimbaud and Laforgue, who like Crane, also led tragically short lives. Their lives and works, along with Walt Whitman (of, course) created ample material for modern American poetry, and Hart Crane is their magnificent heir (especially of Jules Laforgue's lyricism and colloquialisms). If you've never tried Crane before, than this is "the" collection to have. Allow Crane to show you his visions of the world from the inside out, take you on journeys across the ocean, and into the modern city and you'll be amazed at how daily life no longer seems so mundane.

How can I review Hart Crane? He's been part of my consciousness, my whole sense of the possibilities of language and of the English language especially, since I first read his work in the 1950s. At that time, I read him as the fiercest modernist, the wildest adventurer in abstract verbal emotion, yet now I re-read him and find a lapidary conservator of the poetic tradition, rhyming his fervid images in strict quatrains.

None of the critical assessments and explications of Crane's poetry have ever jibed with my visceral/musical response to his exaltations. Yes, he was a tortured soul, tormented by his homosexuality. Yes, he committed suicide. But the vision in his language is far from bleak. It's all a paean of beauty. What I think happened, when he jumped from the ship into the sea that had always been a symbol of overwhelming infinity, was that he lost his religion, that is, his belief in the salvation offered by poetic transformation:

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wing shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty --

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day...

That's how Crane launches his huge poem The Bridge, with an invocation addressed to the icon of his modernity, the Brooklyn Bridge, and to the city of New York. "Liberty" is of course the statue, and it was the liberty of his choice to write poems for a life that took him to New York. Beyond that hint of my understanding of Crane, let your ears make what you want of it. I suppose Crane is ultimately a musician's poet; like music, his words pulse with feeling that never needs to be forced to be explicit.

Beautifully written, Crane's poetic compositions, with their choice diction, dense and imaginative allegories and technical virtuosity, fall easily into the category of the poetry of "sensation", that is say, poetry characterised chiefly by the registering of impressions. It must be acknowledged that Crane's gifts were best suited to the lyric form. His accomplished style, rhetorical, incantatory, inventive and rhapsodic, steeped in Symbolism and Romanticism, places him above the entire gallery of American Modernist poets. The poetry of Crane, Whitman's proper heir, while pregnant with symbol and allusion, and broad in intellectual reference, does not grow to become forced, pedantic and overlearned as that of Pound. His protests, his struggles, his torments are no less significant than those of Jeffers, though Crane could at least avoid the latter's preaching and occasional pomposity. Above all, he was the poet of "sensation" par excellence, endowed with a capacity for disclosing the furthest and deepest reaches of emotion and feeling, by virtue of his high poetic gifts. Prodigiously talented and doom-laden, Crane, in spiritual kinship with Rimbaud and Shelley, lived as though he were tyrannised, without respite, by Furies he could not conciliate, developing into a compulsive and violent drunk, battling his homosexual urgings, braving the tide of public opinion, which regarded him as a social outcast, and finally plunging to his death in the ocean (which serves in so many of his poems as a symbol of death) at the age of thirty-two. Few martyrs in art have suffered more painfully. Few have endured more grievous torments. All the more are we compelled to admire Crane's stoicism. "Impavidum ferient ruinae".

I'll try to be brief, for we are on holy ground. Hart Crane is among the greatest English Poets; he extends the orphic tradition--he works under the assumption (fact?) that poetry is nothing less than Life staying Death--and not in the tradition of mere "Culture", of elegant verses for elegant people.

Among his few peers, we have Keats, Stevens, Spenser (of the epithalamium), Blake, Shelley, and Shakespeare--yes, I said it and I meant it...at his best, Crane possesses as much daemonic power as Shakespeare. There are others, without a doubt, but rarely will one enounter so much of the concentrated Sublime, of pure poetry in such a small body of work. Some of his final fragments are more True than most of the Qu'ran, the Bible, etc, etc. Like a saint, Crane sacrificed everything in order to give us the gift of his song, including his own life. If he had lived, he would certainly be better known (as if Fame were enough); he might be esteemed our country's greatest artist. My advice, read "Atlantis" until you have it by heart--your life will never be the same.

In short, this is poetry at its highest. A moral force, a religious power, an estatic appraisal of our collective destruction, a hymn to to city, an elegy for birth, a myth for our exiled god, Love, to Whom we must ever strive to know better.

p.s. There is a rumor that the Library of America will (at last!) put out an edition of Crane this Autumn that is likely to be the one to get (my copy of their Stevens is exquisite--it trumped Knopf's Collected Poems, something I never thought possible. So if you want to save your money, you can wait for that & hit the library in the meantime (assuming that your public library is unlike mine, and has something other than than how-to books and unauthorized biographies of Jane Fonda).

Hart Crane is the paragon of great American orphic poetry - yes, such a thing did (does?) exist. At a time when American poets were taking the turn inward to represent human consciousness through their style in a way that was immediately familiar to itself, Hart Crane stood on the perimeter of that boundary; unwilling to traverse it, or stand outside of it. It is such that a wholistic mysticism pervades each poem in its irreducibility to the subject or the bystander. Each is, in its own way, immediately personal and declarative. Like Whitman - though I whince at the comparison - the poem proceeds as a profound declaration whose import can only be marked on the fringes of itself as a whole.

Hart Crane's brilliant poetry continues in the tradition of Eliot's 'The Wasteland,' in that he is interested in exploring the modern American landscape. Crane's poetry pulsates with his passion and tragedy. Frequent themes are his own homosexuality and the coldness of contemporary existence. His work is tremendous achievement in terms of its visual beauty and lyrical flow:

"Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells."

Hart Crane lived a tragically short life. Fortunately his remarkable work remains.

Crane is an intensely exciting poet, though his verbal barrage might well be too much for some temperaments. Nevertheless, his poetry, though difficult, rewards serious reading.

Length:: 1:46 Mins

I decided on this (relatively) obscure poem, because, rather than Crane's more famous poems (The "Voyages" series, "The Bridge" or "The Broken Tower"), it was unknown to me until I purchased this book. Also, of course, I found it very striking and lovely, though dark.