White Buildings

by Hart Crane

This first book of poems by Hart Crane, one of his three major collections, was originally published in 1926. The themes in White Buildings are abstract and metaphysical, but Crane's associations and images spring from the American scene. Eugene O'Neill wrote: "Hart Crane's poems are profound and deep-seeking. In them he reveals, with a new insight and unique power, the mystic undertones of beauty which move words to express vision." "Genius is a mystery resistant to reductive analysis, whether sociobiological, psychological, or historical. Like Milton, Pope, and Tennyson, the youthful Crane was a consecrated poet before he was an adolescent."—Harold Bloom "Crane's poems are as distinct from those of other contemporary American poets as one metal from another. This man is a mystical maker: he belongs to a group of poets who create their world, rather than arrange it, and who employ the idiom of their fellows with divine arbitrariness to model the vision of themselves."—The New Republic "In single lines of arresting and luminous quality and in whole poems Mr. Crane reveals that his originality is profound."—Times Literary Supplement  "The line structure is so beautiful in itself, the images so vividly conceived, and the general aura of poetry so indelibly felt that the intelligent reader will move pleasurably among the impenetrable nuances."—New York Times

Genres: Poetry, American, 20th Century, Fiction, Literature, School, Canon

96 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1926

About the author

Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio. His father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business with chocolate bars. He originally held the patent for the Life Saver, but sold his interest to another businessman just before the candy became popular. Crane’s mother and father were constantly fighting, and early in April, 1917, they divorced. It was shortly thereafter that Hart dropped out of high school and headed to New York City. Between 1917 and 1924 he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, working as an advertising copywriter and a worker in his father’s factory. From Crane's letters, it appears that New York was where he felt most at home, and much of his poetry is set there.

Crane was gay. As a boy, he had been seduced by an older man. He associated his sexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as a social pariah. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary in order for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work.

Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. White Buildings contains many of Crane’s best lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and a powerful sequence of erotic poems called "Voyages," written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner.

"Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land, he also said it was "so damned dead," an impasse, and a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities." Crane’s self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America." This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.

The Bridge received poor reviews by and large, but worse was Crane’s own sense of his work's failure. It was during the late '20s, while he was finishing The Bridge, that his drinking, always a problem, became notably worse.

While on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico in 1931-32, his drinking continued while he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. His only heterosexual relationship - with Peggy Cowley, the soon to be ex-wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley, who joined Crane in the south when the Cowleys agreed to divorce - began here, and "The Broken Tower," one of his last published poems, emerges from that affair. Crane still felt himself a failure, though, in part because he recommenced homosexual activity in spite of his relationship with Cowley. Just before noon on 27 April 1932, while onboard the steamship SS Orizaba heading back to New York from Mexico - right after he was beaten for making sexual advances to a male crew member, which may have appeared to confirm his idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual - he committed suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed Crane's intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard.

His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA".

Reviews

[Gaurav Sagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.
-Arnold Bennett



He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic clad have: but he has also, what they have not, -this strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of cities to the Atlantis
-EMERSON ON PLATO

Genius is a mystery resistant to reductive analysis, whether sociobiological, psychological, or historical.
- HAROLD BLOOM
-

The abovementioned quote from Emerson underlines the poetry of Crane- he is modernist in every sense-Experimentation and uniqueness in both thought and metrical forms are to be found in his work- yet so different and peculiar from every other modernist. There are so many unique things about style, imagery, form of his poetry which makes it hard to put his poetry under any predefined ‘genres’. Nevertheless, there is one thing which is certain about him-he was one of his kind and definitely one of the ‘greats’ in poetic Diaspora of the world. This was the first time I read Hart Crane, perhaps any American poets, for I am still quite naïve in poetry. But his poetry immediately stroked a chord with me, for it is full of imaginative prowess of Crane.


Hart Crane may come across as a difficult poet since he was intensely metaphorical and allusive, combined with his transcendental yearnings, and his high invocatory style, his logic of metaphor characteristically gives us the sensation of an impacted density, sometimes resistant to unraveling. I must admit I find these simple poems strangely moving. What is clear in Crane, other than the power and the traditionalism of his inventive will, is the effect of inchoate powers through which he rose to expression. Urban areas, machines, the warring yearnings of desolate and grouped men, the interests discharged from vanquished loyalties, were ever close to overpower the artist. To ace them, he should frame his Word unaided. In his absence of legitimate terms to express his association with life, Crane was a true culture-child; more completely than either Emily Dickinson or Blake, he was a child of modern man. Hart Crane was Nitzschean in approach, he may be called a mystic; The spiritualist is a man who knows, by prompt involvement, the natural progression between his self and the universe. This experience, which is the ordinary product of affectability, ends up extraordinary in a man whose local vitality is incredible; and keeping in mind that it transform into a staggering, shattering weight, it must be savagely trained and requested. The simplest guard from this spiritualist burden is obviously the normal one of denying the spiritualist experience out and out. In age like our own, one is basically one so innately resource-less that one tackles, by refutation and forceful restraint, the issue of natural coherence between the self and an apparently turbulent world-therefore propagating the internal and-outward tumult. This is excessively challenging for most men: independent from anyone else learning and self discipline, it is to accomplish inside one's self a steady core to hold up under lastly transfigure the world's impinging disorder.


The themes of these poems are high enough.This focal creative ability, needing the unitary rule or topic, falters and breaks turns hack upon itself as opposed to acing the conceived substance of the lyric. That is the reason, in this first gathering, a fragmentary piece of a ballad is now and then more prominent than the entirety. What's more, that is the reason it is now and again difficult to transpose a progression of pictures into the sense-and thought-arrangement that initially moved the artist and that must be seen with a specific end goal to move the reader.


Among the most important of the verses in White Buildings is “Chaplinesque,” which he produced after viewing the great comic Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Kid.” In this poem Chaplin’s chief character—a fun-loving, mischievous tramp—represents the poet, whose own pursuit may be perceived as trivial but is nonetheless profound.




PASTORALE

No more violets,
And the year
Broken into smoky panels.
What woods remember now
Her calls, her enthusiasms.

That ritual of sap and leaves
The sun drew out,
Ends in this latter muffled
Bronze and brass. The wind
Takes rein.

If dusty, I bear
An image beyond this
Already fallen harvest,
I can only query, "Fool-
Have you remembered too long"




NORTH LABRADOR

A land of leaning ice
Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,
Flings itself silently
Into eternity.

"Has no one come here to win you,
Or left you with the faintest blush
Upon your glittering breasts?
Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright ?"

Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments
That journey toward no Spring-
No birth, no death, no time nor sun
In answer."



FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN

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."

"Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies,

Steadily as a shell secretes
Its beating leagues of monotone,
Or as many waters trough the sun's
Red kelson past the cape's wet stone;

O rivers mingling toward the sky
And harbor of the phoenix's breast-
My eyes pressed black against the prow
-They derelict and blinded guest"




FOR THE MARRIAGE OF FAUSTUS AND HELEN

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 earth may glide diaphanous to death;
But if I lift my arms it is to bend
To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing
The press of troubled hands, too alternate
With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.
I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame
You found in final chains, no captive then-
Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;
White, through white cities passed on to assume
That world which comes to each of us alone.

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

White Buildings is the first collection by American poet Hart Crane published in 1926. In it, I've found cryptic metaphors, puzzling symbols, obscure allusions, modernism and other features that make one wonder if there's a great style that was applied to any subject at all¹. It all requires doing some research to begin to grasp the meaning behind these poems—if that's even an achievable task. I've done that with a few authors. Unfortunately, I wasn't interested enough this time. It's not my kind of poetry. However, there's great originality in a poem like "For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen". "Voyages" also contains a couple of lovely lines, especially Part V.

For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen
"And so we may arrive by Talmud skill
And profane Greek to raise the building up
Of Helen's house against the Ismaelite,
King of Thogarma, and his habergeons
Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force
Of King A baddon, and the beast of Cittim;
Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos,
And A ben Ezra do interpret Rome. "
-THE ALCHEMIST.

I

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.
(...)

Sep. 14, 2021
* Later on my blog.
¹ Edmund Wilson vía Boston Review

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

In alternating bells have you not heard
All hours clapped dense into a single stride?
Forgive me for an echo of these things,
And let us walk through time with equal pride.

A strange gathering of themes, mythic and maritime funneled through an urban lens. I'm not sure of the desired end.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend of mine was once enamored of Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World; I think he found in it a literary refutation of an unsustainable idealism toward which he was then tempted—and he also thought that it illuminated the work of Guns N'Roses (on the title page he wrote G N'R and Their World in parentheses). Anyway, I asked him if he had ever read Rabelais (I had not, and I still haven't), and I've always treasured his reply: "I'm not sure what it would even mean to read Rabelais."

I am sometimes not sure what it even means to read poetry, or to say that one has read it. An Internet-based acquaintance once told me that I didn't become obsessed with poetry at a young enough age, and that I was consequently stuck in "novel-world." That's one of those judgments with which I would concur provided it were expressed more affirmatively: modern lyric poetry is the expression of sensibility and is accordingly hermetic and of an exemplary difficulty—but come on, the novel is the bright book of life!

A novel—and I think this goes for plays too, even Shakespeare—is usually macroscopic, whatever microscopic pleasures it affords. It can be taken in in one reading; one reading is enough to grasp the central lines of conflict and the aesthetic mood that guides our reaction to said conflict. I usually feel free to say that I have "read" a novel (likewise a play) after I've read it, even if it is of the type that demands or rewards infinite re-readings. But lyric poetry seems to require something else, something akin to—if not simply, literally—memorization. How many poems have I "read"? Not nearly enough. These days, I do not feel that I've "read" a poem until I've taught it; only explication at the lectern or communal exegesis will do. And in fact I often prefer to teach poetry, even though I mostly prefer to read (and write) novels.

So have I now read Hart Crane's poems? I have dipped into them many times over the years but was repelled by their surface, which struck me as verbose and overblown. There is only one reason I dipped then and plunged now: the advocacy of Harold Bloom, who loves Crane like no other, and who writes about him again in his new book, The Daemon Knows, which I intend to read very soon.

I applied myself to Crane's first collection, White Buildings, published in 1926, when Crane himself was just 27. It has a marvelous epigraph from an even "younger" poet, Rimbaud: "Ce ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avançant" ("This cannot be anything but the end of the world, advancing"). But Crane's poems seem less concerned with the end of the world, in the sense of a general conflagration/revelation like that which haunts the era's master poem, The Waste Land. Rather, death is always near, but it is either personal or universal, above or below any particular world (I assume here that "the end of the world" is always implicitly, behind the religious rhetoric, a social concept—the end of this world, the one I live in, the Roman world, the Aztec world, etc.), while the poet has access to an energy that may resist the end, as here, from the last lines of "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen":

Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile
Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height
The imagination spans beyond despair,
Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.

The poems in general present themselves as high walls of language, impasto'd sound surfaces, with meanings not always clear. I have read the following lines from "Voyages," for instance, over and over and still have no idea of what it means:

In signature of the incarnate word
The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
And widening noon within your breast for gathering
All bright insinuations that my years have caught
For islands where must lead inviolably
Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,—

In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.

As is typical of Crane, the syntax is hard to grasp (for one thing, what is the object of the verb "shoulders"?), the diction Latinate (signature, incarnate, transpiring, insinuations, inviolably, latitudes), and the topic only vaguely discernible (erotic love and the sea as holy instances of word made flesh?). All the pleasure is in the play of words, the language's decoration of the high topic, words hung like garlands around sex and death and ocean.

This very slim volume has two introductions, one from 1926 by Allen Tate and one from 1972 by John Logan. In comparing them, we perhaps see a decline in literary criticism. Logan's introduction is mind-numbingly biographical. It derives from Crane's apparent bisexuality a schematic psychoanalytic reading of his poetry in which its subtext is revealed as the attempt to synthesize masculine and feminine sensibilities. All in all, it's the kind of thing that gives psychoanalytic criticism a bad name:

There is a displacement, in Crane's poetry, of the language of the body to the language of the landscape...Although such displacement (one kind of metaphor) is general in poetry, one might find a hint in the particular appearance of it in this "grandmother" poem that Hart Crane's overt homosexuality is in part a defense against admitting the physical feeling for the grandmother or surrogate mother.

It takes a special kind of tastelessness to think that one of the volume's most translucent and moving poems, "My Grandmother's Love Letters," would be clarified by some overt oedipal gesture in conformity to mid-century Freudian dogma. The poem itself beautifully warns us against all coarseness in reading and interpretation:

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

Allen Tate's original introduction to the volume, however, is useful and concise, explaining Crane's poetic and its historical context. Crane, Tate says, must write poetry in the modern world, which has lost the stability and coherence previously provided by Christianity and organic social forms. The modern poet, therefore, must "construct and assimilate his own subjects," whereas a pre-modern poet such as Dante only had to "assimilate his," since his society furnished him a subject of sufficient dignity and beauty for poetic treatment. Because Crane is not an Eliotic conservative but a Whitmanian affirmer of the American city, nostalgia or myth can provide him no recourse; the ship really has sailed, to invoke a nautical metaphor appropriate to Crane's imagery, and the poet thus has to extrude his material from his own inner imaginative vision. Tate explains that this is why Crane's poetry is so often obscure. Unlike Dante or even Eliot, whose apparently difficult poetry becomes clearer and clearer as you grasp the traditional meanings of their symbols, Crane's symbols may have no traditional (or transpersonal) meaning at all:

[Crane's] theme never appears in explicit statement. It is formulated through a series of complex metaphors which defy a paraphrasing of the sense into equivalent prose. The reader is plunged into a strangely unfamiliar milieu of sensation, and the principle of its organization is not immediately grasped. The logical meaning can never be derived (see Passage, Lachrymae Christi); but the poetical meaning is a direct intuition, realized prior to an explicit knowledge of the subject-matter of the poem. The poem does not convey; it presents; it is not topical, but expressive.

That is very well said. And it implies that the best way to read Crane is to let him wash over you (more sea images), let his words and pictures saturate (again!) your own sensibility. Drop the margin-poised pencil, forget the dictionary of myth and symbol, and plunge in. Here, for instance, is a stanza from one of the poems Frank judges to be without logical meaning, "Lachrymae Christi":

(Let sphinxes from the ripe
Borage of death have cleared my tongue
Once again; vermin and rod
No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
Betrayed stones slowly speak.)

This is both incoherent, even to the point of its being ungrammatical, and yet somehow emotionally intelligible: "vermin and rod / No longer bind," "tendoned loam"—I do feel it.

But Crane's is a hit-or-miss method, and I find, to vary the cliche, that a little of it goes a long way. The more extended poems continue to elude me, though I think I probably love "Voyages," the collection's triumphant conclusion. Mostly the shorter and earlier poems are my favorites, though.

"Black Tambourine," for instance, is a misguided stab at racial solidarity, but nevertheless a dense statement of a genuine historical perspective, which is a useful thing to have:

The interests of a black man in a cellar
Mark tardy judgment on the world's closed door.
Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,
And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.

I think the judgment is "tardy" because, in Crane's view, the black man is only the latest or most explicit instance of the social exclusion to which the modern poet testifies. The problems with that self-serving notion hardly need elaboration—yet if one reverses the priority in the metonymy (from black man/poet to poet/black man) so that the text redefines racism as the abjection of the black man in the same terms in which the poet is also abjected (licentiousness, laziness, primitivism, etc.), then it makes a certain sense, and a more charitable reading is possible.

"At Melville's Tomb" pays tribute to Crane's precursor in death and seafaring and homoeroticism and imagination:

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

The first line and a half of this concluding stanza show how aphoristic Crane can be, demonstrate his love not only of Melville but of Dickinson. What better tribute to a writer who could navigate the sea but also what was beyond the farthest tide?

I don't understand a word of the poem "Paraphrase," and yet I feel it describes an experience I must have had, something to do with sleeping and waking, dreaming and trying to remember the dream, with maybe a hint of the masturbatory? I don't know, here is the final stanza:

As, when stunned in that antarctic blaze,
Your head, unrocking to a pulse, already
Hallowed by air, posts a white paraphrase
Among bruised roses on the papered wall.

I have read every poem in the volume at least twice and some many more times than that, but I need to go on re-reading "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" and "Voyages," not to mention "Wine Menagerie" and "Repose of Rivers."

My two favorite poems are probably "Garden Abstract" and "Emblems of Conduct." I want to discuss the latter poem at a later date, probably in connection with Bloom, so let's end in the garden:

The apple on its bough is her desire,—
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

This poem is a little guide (an "abstract") to Crane's poetry, counseling a refusal of the desire for knowledge that would make any poetry a matter of allegory. Don't desire to consume the poem, but rather become the poem, chant the poem, let the poem possess you. Crane boldly re-writes Genesis to find the source of the Fall in the desire for knowledge, and he redeems Eve by turning her into Daphne, rebuke to the arrogant Apollonian poet, just as he had conflated Christ with Dionysus in "Lachrymae Christi." But even to advance such an advocacy for non-meaning, Crane had to invoke tradition, which is to say meaning. And it is no wonder that a philistine like myself, lost in novel-world, would prefer such a poem with its foregrounded narrative and meta-narrative.

Have I read Hart Crane? I don't know what it would mean to read Hart Crane. More to the point, Hart Crane doesn't know what it would mean to read Hart Crane. And I will not deny that some part of me would rather read Dante or Eliot or a novel, but I suspect White Buildings will linger in my mind, or—Bakhtin might approve—my mouth.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read as part of the 'Collected Poems'.

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Musical like Whitman. Dense like Eliot.

A year with Crane wouldn’t plumb his depths. A master of language. I don’t understand these poems. But they were wonderfully fun to read.

My favorite line:

From “Emblems of Conduct”

By a peninsula the wanderer sat and sketched

My favorite stanza:

From “Passage”

Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.

My favorite poem:

At Melville’s Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

[Pewterbreath · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been reading this book over and over for a year and a half now, and still I cannot claim to understand half of it. What I do understand is that Hart Crane spoke in fragments, that his strange affected language was an attempt to express the inexpressable. That in an era where homosexuality was taboo, this was as clear as it got. He requires digging, but don't be afraid---he's the sort who you need to have faith that meaning will be there, to read closely, and more than once, hell more than a hundred times, and it will come to you. These aren't simple "I feel" poems, they attempt to convey actual meaning--not simple impressions: the voice of an elegant misfit in a crumbling world.

[Descending Angel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hart crane didn't leave behind a lot when he took his own life (some early poems, 3 books of poems and some letters) but he sure made his mark and influenced a lot of writers to come. White Buildings is a collection of 23 poems, all of them worth reading. Highlights ~ "legend" "emblems of conduct" "my grandmother's love letters" "stark major" "chaplinesque" "possessions" "For The Marriage Of Faustus And Helen" and "voyages".

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

White Buildings feels a little bit traditional, for those of you who aren't interested in po-mo stuff at all. However, its brilliance transcends the aesthetic battles.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Crane celebrates modernity’s uplifting potential. Top tip: Voyages.

[Luke]

My Grandmother's Love Letters

There are no stars 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
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
...
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 sound of gently pitying laughter.


Garden Abstract

The apple on its bough is her desire,—
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

[Christopher]

From the last word I’ve irascibly pounded my fist upon the table, defenestrated every last meager book of poetry, and have set fire to all other works of English prose.

This is the fit of rage I’ve been reduced to, a myopic existence forced to now trudge through miles of mediocrity. Why oh why must I now read among the existence of other writers, let alone poets within the anglophonic world, when the heart of Hart beats fiercer than every other?

Pound for pound, my most treasured poet.

Faves: My Grandma’s Love Letters, Garden Abstract, Voyages, Repose of Rivers, Passage, Melville’s Tomb, Possession

also just read The Broken Tower, it’s not formally in this one but is in the complete poems; essential.

[Patch · Rating 4 out of 5]

very soft and shimmery, lots of nature imagery and mythological allusions, themes of love and change and solitude. There's something charmingly incongruous too, as well as a strange underlying bitterness. my favorite poem was North Labrador, particularly the line "Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments That journey toward no Spring— No birth, no death, no time nor sun In answer"

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

poems that are so seductively impenetrable and inscrutable I'm fascinated but hardly know why ...

[Travissimo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is definitely the best collection to have of Hart Crane, at least to start off with. It is short and sweet, but incredibly beautiful. If you haven't read Crane before, start with this. i love it.

[Jenni · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite of his. Master of the compact, half-page Baudelaire type lyric.

[Lyn]

He's so strange but I love Hart Crane.

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 5 out of 5]

During Poetry Month, and to coincide with a great essay I read on Hart Crane in O’Connell’s ‘Bowie’s Bookshelf,’ I decided to pick up the Library of America’s collection of Crane’s work that contained his complete poems – The Bridge, White Buildings, and Key West, along with his random poems published in magazines and an extensive collection of correspondence he had in his short life. I didn’t know much of anything about Crane, and I am very excited to have picked up these texts that depicts everything that evokes wonder in our modern American structure. Within these pages, there is a clear robust energy of queer exuberance, love for wordplay, classics, and the American experience, as well as what feels like confounding and puzzling execution that is truly only approachable at arm's length at best.

WHITE BUILDINGS was a collection that had quite a few intriguing and wild swings as it progressed. It contains some difficult pieces, and reading the collection ultimately feels like dipping one’s toe into an ocean of triple metaphor and allusion in a cloak of uncertain and at times erotic imagery. I learned Crane’s first book was legendarily postponed several times because T.S. Eliot couldn’t entirely articulate how much he truly loved Crane’s work, and that is something to be said that one of the greatest poetic voices couldn’t find words to appropriately introduce such cutting-edge poesy. He does here a lot of what Eliot does, but seemingly better and more modern, more difficult, and stranger.

Perhaps knowing what he had in his talent, he went on to create what many considered to be his main contribution – and the piece that is featured on Bowie’s list – THE BRIDGE. A momentous and confounding eight-part epic that is neither a long poem nor a connected series of separate poems... It is an examination of the wonder of this particular point in Crane’s history, America’s history, and a variety of historical events that he uses to memorialize and metaphorically reflect on New York, his life as a queer poet, the troubled history of our nation, and the energy that guides connection and history. I think I wrote a terrible explanation, but it is difficult to parse exactly everything that he covers – connections between these elements are so fluidly made, areas of consciousness and reality that really have no business being connected through allusion and storytelling that is somehow representative of the self, the nation, history, and fable all at once. It is remarkable, and I wouldn’t be one to say that I entirely understood everything... But the organization into the octet of pieces allows one the distance to take in portions and ruminate on them before moving on. It is an arc in a way, one that begins and ends on the bridge but makes versatile and athletic metacognitive leaps and stops in between.

I learned after finishing it that there are several annotated versions of the poem, so I will likely be looking into reading one of those if I end up rereading the piece. Remarkable.

KEY WEST is the shortest of the collections, and less ambitious than the other two. Appreciation, water, and more allusion make up most of these pieces, but not to the extent that White Buildings and The Bridge glorify and exalt the New York state of mind. They are shorter, but no less playful or energetic... They just aren’t as momentous, and honestly, his earlier work was a high bar to set.

This is pretty much his only contribution to his craft, although no one will argue that he is one of the most powerful voices of the modernist poetic movement. It is a wonder what the remaining work would look like through World War II, desegregation, the boom that followed, and more harrowing wars that would have brought him face to face with some of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century – and would have brought the world some more incredible work.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

God. The "Voyages" sequence, especially the first three, are just... they're just so good. So good! One of my favorites, for sure.

That said, though... they ain't easy. Nothing Crane wrote is. He was strongly influenced by the French Symbolism, and his poems don't always (or ever, you could argue) proceed in any sort of obvious, logical, rational manner. His poems are about sound and emotion and feeling, and I think you just have to let yourself go, fall into them, and then Google the shit out of everything, because dude had a huge vocabulary.

Regardless, this book would get all the stars even if it was composed solely of the first three "Voyages," so there's that. I mean, listen to this: "Light wrestling there incessantly with light, / Star kissing star through wave on wave unto / Your body rocking!" Holy shit. I can't even. And then this ecstatic love poem ends with such a soft, single line: "Permit me voyage, love, into your hands... " *dies a little*

The introduction to this edition, written by Allen Tate back in 1926, was meh. Mostly I have no idea what he's talking about. The foreword, by John Logan, though, is all about how gay/bi the poems are... so I loved that! And it (the foreword, not the poems) was written in the 70s, so pretty impressive.

Worth your time, for sure.

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hart Crane's first poetry collection is not without its passing pleasures. What's not to like about a wild line like "Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen / The incunabula of the divine grotesque." (from "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen"). But then there's the whole problem of explication. For as critic Allen Tate points out in his introduction, with Crane, "the logical meaning can never be derived." Crane's art is often committed to elusiveness. And so one's enjoyment of these verses is dependent upon one's willingness to get lost in the imagery, the mood, and an impressive vocabulary that recalls those calendars that present a new word every day for a year. Yes, the language is rich! Furthermore, his style is as imitated, in its way, as that of e.e. cummings or Anne Sexton. Reading "White Buildings," I sometimes thought, "Oh, this is why so many contemporary poets write like this! It's a school of thought!" Would I prefer Crane if his poems stuck to greater directness as he does in "My Grandmother's Love Letters," "Chaplinesque" and the outdated "Black Tamborine"? Probably not.

[Wuttipol✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars 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
Into a corner of the roof
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 hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:
"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
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 sound of gently pitying laughter.

[James Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hart Crane loved Melville and read Moby-Dick several times along with his other tales of the sea. This was in the early decades of the twentieth century before Melville was renowned as one of America's greatest authors. Crane had a difficult time getting his trbute, "At Melville's Tomb", published. Harriet Monroe rejected it when he submitted it to her Poetry Magazine and Marianne Moore wanted to change it before publication in the Dial, which she edited. Crane withdrew it, but it was included in White Buildings, his first collection of poetry to be published. When Eugene O'Neill agreed to write a foreward to the collection Boni & Liveright chose to publish it. Ultimately O'Neill backed out, but Allen Tate provided a foreward and Crane's first collection of poetry was printed in book form.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look steadily - how the wind feasts and spins
The brain's disk shivered against lust. Then watch
While darkness, like an ape's face, falls away,
And gradually white buildings answer day.

- Hart Crane, Recitative

There's a lot I like about this collection of poetry. It's one of the few cases in which I'm not distracted by rhyming in poetry (though I should point out that the majority of the poems aren't rhyming). I wanted to give this collection four stars, but I was discouraged by some of the racism from Crane's time that found its way into his poetry. This is a difficult problem to address, but ultimately I can't excuse racism in any form, as much as I enjoyed the collection, and I would hesitate to recommend the collection for this reason.

[Kerryvaughan]

I’m not a poetry expert. Often I feel like I don’t “get” it. But I love the poetry in prose, the rhythm of sentences and the braiding of words, so I hope my disorientation here is temporary. I want to read this again at a not so rushed pace. I feel like I lost the buildings in the skyline. But I could tell the skyline was bleak, and I’m always down for a mood.

My linking books game triumphed too; I loved that Melville appeared. Or, really, that Crane appeared At Melville’s Tomb.

#2025books

[Cemal Can · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hart Crane's poetry is so distinctive that imitation seems impossible, unlike T.S. Eliot, who can be emulated to some extent. Crane's work represents perhaps the densest and most challenging poetry I have ever encountered, even as someone studying Finnegans Wake. His verses frequently send readers to dictionaries for clarification, as opposed to Wallace Stevens’ poetry, which remains accessible on the page, leaving us to ponder its deeper meanings.

[j · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unfortunately, our world is one intent on painfully bending us into becoming the types of people who will read one of these poems and be completely incensed. I dunno -- it feels to me like one of the imperatives of being alive, fighting against that, that is.

'Voyages' in particular is stunning. I'm envious of Crane's command of the language.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

The kind of obscurantism that drove me away from modern poetry for a long time. Reading his justifications to Harriet Monroe, in which he unconvincingly compared the comprehensibility of his metaphors to those of Eliot and Blake, left me confident that the juice isn't worth the squeeze for me.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe a little too metaphysical for me...

[Michele Magnifico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crane, niente da dire, solo un abbraccio e una preghiera, ovunque tu sia

[ExeDavid · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars