Hart Crane

The mind has shown itself at times

Too much the baked and labeled dough

Divided by accepted multitudes.

Across the stacked partitions of the day -

Across the memoranda, baseball scores,

The stenographic smiles and stock quotations

Smutty wings flash out equivocations.

-

The mind is brushed by sparrow winds;

Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd

The margins of the day, accent the curbs,

Convoying divers dawns on every corner

To druggist, barber and tobacconist,

Until the graduate opacities of evening

Take them away as suddenly to somewhere

Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.

-

There is the world dimensional for

those untwisted by the love of things

irreconcilable…

-

And yet, suppose some evening I forgot

The fare and transfer, yet got by that way

Without recall, – lost yet poised in traffic.

Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,

Still flickering with those prefigurations -

Prodigal, yet uncontested now,

Half-riant before the jerky window frame.

–

(Hart Crane, from ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’)

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Hart Crane, like Baudelaire and Eliot, was committed to discovering and articulating the mystery and spirit within a modern urban landscape. The gnarly, cryptic language reflects the difficulty of this enterprise; he had to disjoint his mind from the banal everyday, the unimaginative city which makes its citizens automata. In everyday life he accomplished this through alcohol, a lot of alcohol. Aged 17 he would reel down the main street of his small town singing, “I am Christopher Marlowe!” Like Marlowe, and Rimbaud, he came to his poetry very early, seemingly without apprenticeship; and died young.

Crane has been described as a poet’s poet; and since hardly anyone can read poetry these days, that’s as much as to say his readership must be very limited. i read him first when i was about 21, and his words made no impression. i turned to him again about a year later and felt as if a great light were flowing from the book; i was overwhelmed, mastered; and i wondered how i could have read him before and retained no memory.

i feel that the seismic changes in my spirit and mind at that time were due in part to the transformative agency of such poetry. There is something eldritch, unearthly, about Hart Crane’s poetry; fitting, perhaps, since most of it simply appeared in his mind when he was blind drunk, and his task was to write it down. Part five of Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land has a similarly unearthly power, and was similarly ‘dictated’, Eliot reporting the experience as akin to possession.

While i doubt even Hart Crane could have made much of such spectacles as Bradford or Leeds, his New York is evocative, as in his poem 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 -

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The exaltation is precarious. Crane’s end has an inevitable feel to it – he drowned himself when he was 32, an appropriate end for a poet so drawn to dissolution, to escaping the limited self. In one of his last poems, ‘The Broken Tower’, he writes:

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And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)

But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

-

Although hardly anyone has ever read Hart Crane, and one could not expect even an intelligent reader to understand or appreciate his poetry, i am glad he was alive and wrote as he did.