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).
- Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other… But I’ve also been powerfully affected by Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Aimé Césaire, Robert Duncan—poets I met briefly if at all.
- Adrienne Rich, Interview (2001)
