Hart Crane's Bridge

Poet Hart Crane was born Harold Hart Crane in Garrettsville, Ohio, in 1899. His mother was a Chicago debutante, and his father was a very successful candy businessman who actually invented the Lifesaver, that popular ring-shaped mint.

By the time Crane was a teenager, he knew that he was gay, and he was fascinated by the life and career of Oscar Wilde. When his parents' marriage fell apart, Crane dropped out of school and took a train from Cleveland to New York to begin life as a poet. 

He loved being in New York. He was hanging out with poets like E.E. Cummings and Allen Tate, but he had trouble holding a job and making a living there. 

Crane was a modernist poet whose work combined visionary ambition with lyrical intensity. Deeply influenced by Walt Whitman, French Symbolists like Rimbaud, and T. S. Eliot (whom he both admired and resisted), Crane sought to create a distinctly American epic voice.

His first collection, White Buildings (1926), established him as a daring and difficult new poet, praised by critics such as Allen Tate for its musicality and imagery. Crane’s work is marked by dense, imagistic language, often challenging but striving for transcendence and visionary power. His themes often revolved around love, modernity, and the search for meaning in a fragmented world.

From his first collection:

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.

Crane’s most ambitious work, The Bridge (1930) is what he is most remembered for as a poet. It was conceived as a counter-response to Eliot’s The Waste Land. Centering on the Brooklyn Bridge, it aimed to weave together myth, history, and modern life into a unifying American epic. The central symbol of the bridge represents modern achievement, a link between past and future, and a possible spiritual anchor in a chaotic age. The poem moves through American history and myth: Columbus, Pocahontas, Native traditions, industrial modernity, and the jazz age. Crane tries to fuse these fragments into a mythic vision of America, with the bridge as the connecting thread.

It is Hart Crane's first, and only, attempt at a long poem. You will see it described as an epic or a series of lyrical poems, and more recently as a hybrid, perhaps indicative of a new genre, the "modernist epic."

The poem's reception was mixed. Some critics admired its beauty but questioned its coherence. But the poem secured his place as one of the most important voices of American modernism.

He became an alcoholic, and when things got worse, just three years after The Bridge at the age of 33, he killed himself by jumping overboard from a steamship on his way from Mexico to New York. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal.

Despite his relatively small output, his poetry profoundly influenced later writers for its daring ambition and lyrical brilliance.

Excerpt from The Bridge
To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings 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 ...

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year ...

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Imagism and Natural Landscape

I read the poem "The Changing Light" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and thought of some photographs I had taken in San Francisco many years ago. There was something about the light. It wasn't East Coast light.

That poem is from his book How to Paint Sunlight (New Directions,2001) and in the foreword he wrote: "All I ever wanted was to paint light on the walls of life. These poems are another attempt to do it."

I also couldn't help but think about Carl Sandburg's "Fog."

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

That's a poem I read a few times in school classrooms and probably had an English teacher use it for a lesson in imagism. That was the name given to a movement in poetry in the early 20th century and represented by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others. It aimed at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.

A few other poems that might have been in that section of the anthology:

In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

The Apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

and the poem that is sometimes called "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. He actually left it untitled but for a number when it was first published. (I think it should be untitled.)

XXII

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Are all imagist poems so short? No, but many are rather brief. Still, people have a lot to say about a little poem like Williams' "XXII."

I thought this month you might try your hand at a poem that is very much anchored in an outdoor place. Your poem does not need to be purely an exercise in imagism, but it should bring into it the light, the weather and the natural atmosphere of the place. A kind of natural landscape should be present in the poem. Beyond that informal form, if you choose to have something else going on in the poem, all the better.

I was also reading a book about Robert Frost this week and in one section Frost said that a poem should have several doors in it - but the poem shouldn't open them. I'd say that's good advice for this prompt too.