Poetry About Life

HART CRANE (1899 - 1932)

Born in Garretsville, Ohio, in 1899, he spent his childhood with his grandmother in Cleveland, far from his conflictive parents. His beautiful but neurotic mother made the boy her confidant, turning him against his father, a wealthy candy manufacturer. Torn between them, lonely, and dejected, Crane found solace in books and music, and at the age of ten he decided to become a poet. Mostly self-taught (he abandoned high school), the precocious teen devoured both the classics and the latest avant-garde journals.

First edition of White Buildings

In 1916 he traveled to New York, determined to become a writer. He got jobs in advertising and helped out at The Little Review and Seven Arts, where he made useful literary contacts. With the passage of time, he gave in fully to the carnal temptations the city offered in the Roaring Twenties, justifying his self-destructive drinking as necessary to attain the heightened sensibility from which his poetry flowed as well as the transcendence promised in Symbolist theory. His first collection, White Buildings, was published in 1926. One poem in the title, "At Melville's Tomb", first appeared in Poetry, but so puzzled the editor, Harriet Monroe, that she asked for an explanation. Crane provided a detailed exegesis with a defense of his "logic of metaphor"; Monroe printed both, the poem and their now-famous correspondence about it, in the same issue. Crane would often be accused of obscurity for his use of personal symbols, unusual connotations, compression, and elusive methods of association. But by bending logic and stretching words beyond their ordinary meanings, he hoped to achieve a style equal to his lofty vision.

First edition of The Bridge

That grand ambition propelled his bold new undertaking, a long homage �to the Brooklyn Bridge�, for Crane not just an engineering triumph but in its great arches and harp like cables a multivalent symbol. His poem was planned as a "mystical synthesis of 'America' ": an epic assimilation of the country's history and aspirations, an "organic panorama" linking past and present, he told his financial backer Otto Kahn in 1927. Unbeknownst to Crane while he was writing the poem, the window of his room at 110 Columbia Heights, from which he viewed the bridge, was the very same one from which its designer, engineer, and construction supervisor, Washington Roebling, had overseen the building of the span. The Bridge was finally finished in 1939 and printed first in Paris, then in New York.

Statue of Crane in Cleveland

On a Guggenheim fellowship, Crane sailed to Mexico planning to write another epic, based on Hern�n Cort�s. There he befriended the novelist Katherine Anne Porter and had his single affair with a woman, Peggy Baird, the ex-wife of the poet and critic Malcolm Cowley. Crane's excesses increased, his work became sporadic, then tapered off altogether; beginning to doubt his abilities, he attempted suicide. With his grant funds running out, Crane booked passage with Baird back to the United States on the Orizaba. Following a fight on board, on April 27, 1932, somewhere north of Havana, the poet jumped from the ship and vanished beneath the waves...

AT MELVILLE'S TOMB

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.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,

Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,

Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;

And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive

No farther tides... High in the azure steeps

Monody shall not wake the mariner.

This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Herma Melville's Grave, Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx

This poem is a little elegy upon Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, the great American novel of the sea and whaling. The general meaning of the poem is easy enough. The poet says that the spirit of the writer whose imagination was so vividly engaged by the sea, and who saw such grandeur in man's struggle with it, though his body might be buried on land, would find its real abiding place in the sea, this could also be related to Crane's suicide from the ship on April 27 (1932): "This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps". The imagery of the poem, however, provoked the editor (as we have already mentioned above) who first published the poem to write the poet to ask several questions concerning the detailed meaning:

Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else); and how a calyx (of death's bounty or anything else) can give back a scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph; and how, if it does, such a portent can be wound in corridors (of shells or anything else).

And so on. I find your image of frosted eyes lifting altars difficult to visualize. Nor do compass, quadrant and sextant contrive tides, they merely record them, I believe.

All this may seem impertinent, but is not so intended. Your ideas and rhythms interest me, and I am wondering by what process of reasoning you would justify this poem's succession of champion mixed metaphors, or which you must be conscious. The packed line should pack its phrases in orderly relation, it seems to me, in a manner tending to clear confusion instead of making it worse confounded (This correspondence between Harriet Monroe and Hart Crane appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse).

The first part of the poet's reply to the editor's letter containing these questions was concerned with the general justification of comparisons which are not scientifically and logically exact. The poet then undertook to analyze the implied points of reference behind his own use of imagery:

... I'll... come at one to the explanations you requested on the Melville poem: "The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath An embassy."

Dice bequeath an embassy, in the first place, by being ground (in this connection only, of course) in little cubes from the bones of drowned men by the action of the sea, and are finally thrown up on the sand, having "numbers" but no identification. These being the bones of dead men who never completed their voyage, it seems legitimate to refer to them as the only surviving evidence of certain messages undelivered, mute evidence of certain things, experiences that the dead mariners might have had to deliver. dice as a symbol of chance and circumstance is also implied.

"The calyx of death's bounty giving back," etc.

This calyx refers in a double ironic sense both to a cornucopia and the vortex made by a sinking vessel. As sson as the water has closed over a ship this whirlpool sends up broken spars, wreckage, etc., which can be alluded to as livid hieroglyphs, making a scattered chapter so far as any complete record of the recent ship and her crew is concerned. In fact, about as much definite knowledge might come from all this as anyone might gain from the roar of his own veins, which is easily heard (haven't you ever done it?) by holding a shell close to one's ear.

"Frosted eyes lift altars"

refers simply to a conviction that a man, not knowing perhaps a definite god yet being endowed with a reverence for deity�such a man naturally postulates a deity somehow, and the altar of that deity by the very action of the eyes lifted in searching.

"Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive no farther tides."

Hasn't it often occurred that instruments originally invented for record and computation have inadvertently so extended the concepts of the entity they were invented to measure (concepts of space, etc.) in the mind and imagination that employed them, that they may metaphorically be said to have extended the original boundaries of the entity measured? This little bit of "relativity" ought not to be discredited in poetry now that scientists are proceeding to measure the universe of principles of pure ration, quite as metaphorical, so far as previous standards of scientific methods extended...

Obviously, this correspondence raises some very interesting questions that frequently appear in connection not only with poems like this one by Hart Crane, but also with all poetry. People sometimes say: "But the poet couldn't have been thinking of al this when he wrote the poem." And in the sense in which they are using the term "thinking" they are right. The poet certainly did not draw up an analysis of his intention, a kind of blueprint, and then write the poem to specification. But it is only a very superficial view of the way the mind works that would cast the question into those terms. The process of composing the poem is a process of exploring the full implications of the intended meaning and of finding a suitable structure. The process is probably one of movement by trial and error, governed by self-criticism.

In attempting to answer questions about his own poem, Crane is obviously acting int he role of observer or critic, and one is not to confuse this process of analysis with the process that probably occurred in the actual composition. Moreover, one is not to suppose that the reader necessarily must duplicate the process of analysis in experiencing the force of the poem. But as the preliminary discipline of the poet extends and enriches his capacity for creation, so the process of rudy extends the reader's capacity for appreciation.

TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE