Hard Life of a Visionary Poet

Hart Crane may well be among the three or four best American poets of this century. As his latest biographer, Paul Mariani, declares: “It would be difficult to find a serious poet or reader of poetry in this country today who has not been touched by something in Crane’s music.”

But for many years, Crane remained, if not quite a marginal figure, then certainly not one who received the amount of attention lavished on Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams. A genuine 20th century Romantic visionary, Crane fell outside the Modernist canon. Nor did he seem to benefit much from the florescence of Gay Studies, even though he’d written some of the most splendid poetry ever to celebrate homosexual love. As a poet who sought out the richest language and most complex metaphors to express the kind of transcendent experience that resists being put into words, Crane could not be called easy or accessible. He was not the sort of writer who makes a good spokesman for a cause.

Crane’s life was the stuff of myth and tragedy: Consumed by his passions, he blazed through life like a comet. Born in Ohio in 1899, the only child of ill-matched parents, he left home for New York at age 17. With oddly endearing Midwestern ingenuousness, he pursued the twin goals of excellence and ecstasy, while trying to figure out how to make a living without sacrificing his poetic vocation.

Romantic by temperament and conviction, Crane searched for friendship and love, which he sometimes found but seldom was able to keep. As a poet, his aim was to follow in the footsteps of prophetic visionaries like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and William Blake. He believed, contra his contemporary Eliot, that “certain spiritual events and possibilities” were “as real and powerful now as . . . in the time of Blake.”

Crane experienced moments of intense joy, illumination and vision. He also suffered the terrible despondency that came from doubting his vision. He consumed vast quantities of alcohol to feed his creative fires, to embolden him in his sexual pursuits and to provide an escape from the daily grind of trying to earn enough.

Nor was it easy trying to lead a meaningful life as a homosexual in 1920s America. The campier side of the gay scene, which he enjoyed in small doses, was alien to someone of his emotional intensity. Only a few of his straight friends were genuinely tolerant of his orientation. When he finally “came out” to his mother, her response was to blackmail him by threatening to tell his father. As Mariani shows us, some of the disparaging criticisms of his poetry seem to have been at least partly inspired by homophobia.

Shortly before he plunged to his death off the back of a ship in 1932, Crane had embarked on his first serious heterosexual love affair, with his friend Malcolm Cowley’s ex-wife, Peggy. They planned to marry. His fear of failing her may have played a part in his suicide. Then again, he had suffered from suicidal tendencies for years, alternating between bouts of exhilaration and despair, self-confidence and self-disgust, further exacerbated by his alcoholism.

Crane’s first biographer, Philip Horton, relied heavily on the testimony of Crane’s mother. Thirty years later came John Unterecker’s far more exhaustively researched, but far less readable “Voyager.” More material has come to light since then. Mariani’s new life of Crane is not only well-timed, it is also a book that will likely stand the test of time. Mariani is not blind to Crane’s character flaws: his readiness to borrow money, his unwillingness to control his emotional outbursts, his inability to stop drinking even when it was clear to him that he’d reached the point where booze no longer quickened his creative impulses, but destroyed them.

A poet as well as a scholar, Mariani has written biographies of Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Williams. His passion for poetry in general and Crane’s poems in particular informs every page of his book. Mariani writes fluently, often lyrically, and with a momentum that keeps one turning the pages to see what will happen next. It’s a dramatic story, and Mariani isn’t afraid to tell it as dramatically and poignantly as it deserves.