Hart Crane
American writer (1899-1932)
Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet.
Quotes
edit- His thoughts, delivered to me
From the white coverlet and pillow,
I see now, were inheritances—
Delicate riders of the storm.- Praise for an Urn (l. 5-8). In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair (1988).
- 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.- My Grandmother's Love Letters (l. 1-4). In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair (1988).
- And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!- The Bridge. In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair (1988).
- O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,- To Brooklyn Bridge, Stanza 8; from The Bridge.
- O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.- To Brooklyn Bridge, Stanza 11; from The Bridge.
- Goodbye, everybody.
- Last words spoken as he committed suicide by jumping from a cruise ship. Reported in Kristine Bertini, Understanding and Preventing Suicide: The Development of of Self-Destructive Patterns and Ways to Alter Them (2009), p. 134.
Quotes About Crane
edit- I've always loved Hart Crane; but I love him in fractions, delighting in half a dozen of those rhapsodic poems long on style and short on sense but finding the rest mystifying as a Masonic ritual. In some of his best poems, I merely admire lines, and in some of those lines I merely admire phrases.
- William Logan, "The Hart Crane Controversy", Poetry (October 2008).
- I admired Crane very much; in fact, I still do...I have always been interested in that dichotomy and in that great paradox in our history. The clash between the pastoral and the technological, and Crane wrote about that, as did Whitman, as did Leo Marx, as have a lot of people. And certainly that has been one of the themes in my writing; that appeals to me a great deal; and Crane did a very good job with it in his poems, especially in the conception of "The Bridge" itself as a narrative. I like that very much. So he was a very important figure to me at the time and, though he is not as important to me now, he remains important. I think he was an important writer, and I felt about him at one time as I feel about Emily Dickinson now.
- 1981 interview included in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday Edited by Matthias Schubnell (1997)
