Poetry and the American; Readings of Hart Crane

This is poetry on the American produced and recorded by station KPFA in Berkeley California under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center in cooperation with the National Association of educational broadcasters. This program is a profile of the poet Hart Crane as seen primarily through a reading of a few of his poems. The program as presented by Robert Bellew from the University of California at Berkeley. On the 21st of July 1899 in Cleveland Ohio was born to Clarence a crane and the former Grace hocked their only child my son christened Harold Hart Crane just 33 years later. This boy grown a man committed suicide by leaping off the stern of the vessel that was bringing him back to New York from an extended stay in Mexico. From the literary world there has come an outpouring of allergies and remembrances

unparalleled in the history of this country and comparable sense only to the impact of the recent death of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Yet even this testimonial was inadequate to express the sense of loss experienced by the younger poets and writers particularly in the few short years he allowed himself. Harold Hart Crane had become a poet who represented in quintessence their hopes their aspirations and their four doomed defeats. John Donne once wrote No man is an island and tire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent a part of the main. Now it is one thing to understand this. Philosophically it is another thing to feel oneself comfortably and securely a part of the main feeling that for most people is the principal legacy from their parents.

Crane's father was a wealthy son of a wealthy family. He was a successful businessman in his own right. He was impetuous self-centered and in most things determined to have his own way in his own way. Official History does not record so faithfully the mother's failings but it is clear that she was a neurotic woman whose nervous health was fragile and who could not keep from unloading a good deal of her grief under the head of her immature son in this tug of war. This electric atmosphere air what he called quote an avalanche of bitterness and wailing unquote Crane's personality probably started its premature dissolution. Hart Crane's father saw him as a child who grew violently ill with nausea and high fever over such ridiculous causes as a minor social phobia or

slight and as a young man who defiantly stated he would devote his life to poetry. Now this as a summary of the character of his only son was something that filled the elder crane with outrage and his only reaction for many years was to try to break the boy's will. Conversely crane was outraged by his father's treatment of his mother and felt no understanding love or sympathy coming from his father. And it was almost impossible to return any. At the height of the trouble in 1999 Harold crane had signalled his total sympathy with his mother by becoming Hart Crane. It's significant that at the age of 20 the time of his parents break up he wrote an otherwise rather juvenile poem called forgetful us which contains these lines.

Forget fullness is why. Why does a blasted tree be. And it may stunned the civil into prophecy or bury the gods. I can't remember much forgetful mass. Already the note of Oblivion is struck and already the almost mystical insight so there there is the blasted tree symbol of his forever ruined emotional center. There is the symbol stunned into prophecy as he was to seek after and be stunned by the mystical vision. And there is the God of buried. And so it was in a time when intellectually men were feeling themselves isolated. When Hemingway pronounced his last generation when Dada ism and other literary movements were invented to express this feeling all no doubt with

some reason but one feels with a good deal of self pity and glory in the painting. Hart Crane reached his majority and truly an island began a decade of heroic effort not to express his isolation but to fuse himself with the continent of man. Could he overleaped his immediate parents and find a sense of belonging through his maternal grandmother who still lived. And toward whom he felt a great deal of affection. Something of that nature seems involved in the poem entitled My grandmother's love letters. There are no stasis tonight but those of memory. Yet how much room for memory there is in the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough for the letters of my mother's mother Elizabeth that have been pressed so long in to a corner of the room that they are brown and soft and liable to melt as snow over the greatness of such space. Steps must be gentle. It is all by an invisible white hair. It trembles as Burchill limbs webbing the air and I ask myself Are your fingers long enough to play old keys that are that Actos is the silence strong enough to carry back the music to its source and back to you again as though to her.

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand through much of what she would not understand. And so I stumble and the rain continues on the roof. With such a solemn gently pitying laugh there. Between early stays in New York where he established some of those literary acquaintances that were to serve so ambiguously throughout his life. He returned for over a year to Cleveland during which time he made some of his most meaningful friendships with obscure artists William Summers the painter whose work Crane brought to a larger attention was won and through Somers. Ernest Nelson both Somers and Nelson

were older man summers and kept painting despite poverty the long work day family responsibilities. But Ernest Nelson had been driven by these forces to quit a very promising beginning both as poet and painter. The isolation and loneliness and the obscure heroism of Nelson touched crying. And when the older man died crane wrote praise for an urn. One of the most beautiful allergies in American literature are in Nelson he saw combined the eternal sadness of Pyrrho and the enormous sensual gayety of Robin lays Gargantua with a living wisdom which could survive the storm. His remembrance of their talks on the meaning of life and death is ironically commented on in the poem by the clock in the crime of Tory where Nelson's body is reduced to ashes.

As a language might be reduced to its component idioms. Praise for an urn in memoriam Ernest Nelson. It was a kind and northern face that mingled in such exile guys the everlasting eyes of peril and of Gargantua the laughter. His thoughts delivered to me from the white coverlet and the Pella. I see now where inheritances delicate Riders of the star. The slanted moon on the slanting hill once moved toward present to months of what the dead keep living still. And such assessments of the soul as perched in the crematory

lobby the insistent clock commented on touching as well upon our praise of glory as proper to the time. Still having in my gold hair I cannot see that broken brow and miss the dry sound of B. Strachey being a cross-eyed you said Spade Gatto the is well-meant idioms into the Smokies spring that fills the suburbs where they will be loss. They are no trophies of the sun. Toward the end of this period in the summer of 19 22 the

first of his larger concepts became in actuality a poem called for the marriage of Faust us and Helen. The poem was in three sections. In his own words quote I was really building a bridge between the so-called classic experience of beauty and many divergent realities of our seeding confused chaos of today unquote. So that we see once more the effort to connect himself with some larger human scheme. It was shortly after this that I began to think of and write some fragments of what seems in retrospect the inevitable major effort with the inevitable title the bridge in which Brooklyn Bridge was to serve as the central symbol of a long poem that was to be as he put it quote a synthesis of America and its structural identity unquote. Meanwhile he had returned to New

York and in 1924 and 25 wrote the second of his major compositions. The series of six poems called voyages some years earlier at the age of 16. A few days after his first acceptance by a New York little magazine he accompanied his mother to the hart plantation on the Isle of Pines south of Cuba. Dating from this voyage to the tropics islands palms the whole paraphernalia of the sea and heard his poetry forever. The sea fascinated him. That great land larcenous that great waste of contained and formed the formlessness of promise. BRADT struck and continued to vibrate throughout his life the deepest chords of his being. This series of six poems is without doubt the noblest evocation of the sea in

American poetry. I shall read the first three sections. Voyages above the fresh ruffles of the surf bright stripe and urchins fly each other with sand. They have contrived a conquest for shall shocks and their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed gaily digging and scattering. And in answer to their trouble interjections the sun beats lightning on the waves the waves fold funder on the sand. And could they hear me I would tell them all brilliant kids frisk with your dog fondle your shells and sticks bleached by time in the elements. But there is a line you must not cross nor ever trust beyond it

spry cordage of your bodies to caresses to like and faithful from too wide a brass the bottom of the sea is cruel. And yeah it is great a wink of eternity of rimless floods unfettered leeward ings Samite sheeted and procession where a vast ballet would ban laughing the rap inflections of our law. Hey there see those die a Paisano now on scrolls of silver snowiest sentences the sceptered terror of whose sessions Rennes as her demeanors

motion while. All about the piety is of lovers hands. And onward as bells off sirens Salvatore started the Crocus lusters of the star. In these poinsettia meadows of higher tides GEOS of islands all my prodigal complete the dark confessions have I span. Our power turning the shoulders why in the hours and hasten while have Penelas rich man's past superscription of bent foam and wave hastened while they are true. Sleep. Death. Desire. Close round one instant in one floating flower. Bind us in time of seasons clear and all. O men strode

galleons of carob fire. Bequeath us to know our foolish tale is answered in the vortex of our grave. See why I spend drift the die. Infinite concert. When it is bad news this tendered thema view of the light retrieves from sea planes where the sky resigns a brass that every way then Thrones Wyo ribboned water lanes I wind our live then scattered with no stroke wide from your side to this hour the sea lifts also. Oh my hands. And so admitted through black swollen gates that must arrest

all distance otherwise past where Ling pillars and Laiva had eminence the light wrestling their incessant play with moonlight. Stop kissing Stata through wave on wave on to your body rocking and where death if she had presumes no carnage bought this single change upon this fellow are full on from dawn to dawn the silken skill of the trans member month of song are meant to me a voyage of. Into your hands. During the next two years with most of the work being done in two fantastic surges of creativity he all but completed his master

work the bridge the generosity of the banker auto con was largely responsible for freeing him for most of this period from our earning a living and the first of his creative bursts occurred on the Isle of Pines to which he had returned to carry on his writing there for a period of time roughly the month of August 1926. His creativity achieved some kind of infinite push of powers and at the end of that time he had completed about three quarters of the bridge plus a number of his best shorter pieces. Among them Royal Palm. Green rustlings more than regal charities drift coolie from that tower of whispered light. I made the known tides blaze desperate tedious. I watched the sun's most gracious anchorite climb up was by

communings year on year on the turn of the earth for OT Whole Foods and the great trunk that is our fountain rear its from dings in a theory will follow. Our ever fruitless and beyond that yield of sweat the jungle presses with hot love and tender tell our death word breath this sea and it grazes the horizons launched above our mortality day US sending emerald bright our fountain and soul you crown in view unshackled casual of its eyes you are the height as though it soared such wise through heaven too. Not long after his dedicating this magnificent poem to his mother

their relationship began to disintegrate as he realized he was unable to bear both her and his own. After that he made what shift he could to courageous or cowardly to cut himself off from her life and succeeded. Meanwhile his father's second wife had died and he had married a third time. Hart Crane became fond of his stepmother. He became a good deal less sure of the relative guilt in the troubles between his father and mother and his Crane's growing reputation began to convince his father of the validity of Crain's dedication to poetry. A kind of reconciliation with his father took place his father gave him a small but steady financial support in these last years. Though Crane never lost his incredible vitality is asked for a living. Nor the magnificent physique which withstood every hardship

his life after 1926 was an accelerated tale of disintegration. I said earlier that he was an islander trying to create a bridge between himself and the mainland of man. Perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps he spent his life trying to be a bridge first between his parents. Next between his mother and her sanity. Next between his talent and an abstract concept of beauty. Next between the real imperfect America and our noble mystical destiny. In the end perhaps it was less his failure than that of the persons and things he tried to unify as if it Lantus that mythical continent which had for so long intrigued him had sunk into the welter of water leaving him an abstract bridge of language in the midst of the sea whose ends

anchored to no reality. Out of the mother soil of America. The legendary Pocahontas of Crain's epic poem the bridge out of the fic undertake a spiritually handed on to the Pioneer Woman from the tragic Indian mother come such man such signs restless Wanderers after majestic clouds that look like mountains. Or rather explorers of mountains as he uses as clouds. From Part two of the bridge. The section called Indiana. The Morning-Glory climbing in the morning along over the lentil on its wire a

vine closes before the DAs firs in its song as I close my eyes. And bison founder rends my dreams no more as once my room was torn my boy when you did your first cry at the prairie's door your father knew then though we'd buried him behind as far back on the Gold trail. Then his last day. But you who dropped the side to grasp the O.R. knew not nor heard. How are we to prodigal once rode off to wave seminary Hill a gay goodbye. We found God lavish there in Colorado but passing a sly pebble sang the fire

cat slunk away and glistening through the sluggard freshets came in golden syllables loosed from the clay his gleaming name. A dream called Eldorado was his town that rose up shambling in the Nuggets wake. It had no charter but a promised crown of claims to stay. But we are too late too early howsoever one nothing out of 59. Those years. But the promise yielded to us never and barren tears. The long trail back. I huddled in the shade of wagon tenting looked out once and saw a bent westward passing on a stumbling Jade a homeless squaw. Perhaps a half breed. On her slender back she cradled a baby's body.

Riding without rain. I rise. Strange for an Indians were not black but sharp with pain and like twins Staios they seemed to shun the gaze of all our silent man the long team Aline and two she saw me when their Violet Hades lit with love shine. I held you up by you suddenly the boulder knew that mere words could not have brought us nearer. She nodded. And that smile across her shoulder will still endear her. As long as Jim your father's memory is warm. Yes Larry now you're going to see. Remember YOU were the first before Ned and this farm first born remember.

And since then all that's left to me of Jim Rose folks like mine came out of Arrowhead and you're the only one with eyes like him. Kentucky bred. I'm standing still. I'm all I'm half of stone. Oh hold me in those eyes and gaging blue. There is rather stubborn years gleam in the tone where gold is true down the damned Turnpike to the river's edge. Perhaps I'll hear the mare's hoofs to the ford. Write me from Rio and you'll keep your pledge I know your word. Come back to Indiana not too late. Or will you be a ranger to the end.

Good bye good bye. I shall always wake you Larry. Travel light. STRANGER. Sign my friend. This profile of Hart Crane was presented by Robert Bellew for poetry in the American was produced and recorded by KPFA in Berkeley California under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center and distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the NABC Radio Network.