1. Hart Crane dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year and left for New York City, promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University.
39 Facts About Hart Crane
1. 2.
Hart Crane left no suicide note, but witnesses to his jump believed he was intentionally killing himself.
3.
Hart Crane had one known female partner, Peggy Cowley, around a year before his death.
4.
Hart Crane has been praised by several playwrights, poets, and literary critics, including Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Bloom; the latter called him "a High Romantic in the era of High Modernism".
5.
Hart Crane's father was a successful Ohio restaurateur and businessman who invented the Life Savers candy and held the patent, but sold it for $2,900 before the brand became popular.
6.
Hart Crane made other candy and accumulated a fortune from the business with chocolate bars.
7.
Clarence Hart Crane's sister, Alice Hart Crane Williams, was a composer and literary editor.
8.
Hart Crane has woven rose-vines About the empty heart of night, And vented his long mellowed wines Of dreaming on the desert white With searing sophistry.
9.
Hart Crane's first published work was the poem "C33", which was published in the Greenwich journal Bruno's Weekly in 1917 in a feature entitled "Oscar Wilde: Poems in His Praise".
10.
Hart Crane dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year in December 1916 and left for New York City, promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University.
11.
Hart Crane took various copywriting jobs and moved between friends' apartments in Manhattan.
12.
Hart Crane worked in a munitions plant until the end of World War I 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.
13.
Hart Crane wrote his mother and grandmother in the spring of 1924:.
14.
White Buildings contains many of Hart Crane's most well-received and popular poems, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen", and "Voyages", a sequence of erotic poems.
15.
Hart 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".
16.
Hart Crane returned to New York in 1928 following a hurricane which left the Cuban residence damaged, and began living with friends and taking temporary jobs as a copywriter, or living off unemployment and the charity of friends and his father.
17.
Hart Crane was overjoyed at the views the location afforded him.
18.
Hart Crane's mother, following her second marriage breakup, was living in the Los Angeles area.
19.
Hart Crane revealed his homosexuality to her, causing a confrontation.
20.
Hart Crane sneaked out on May 15,1928, never to see her again.
21.
Hart Crane later found out about the death of his grandmother, Elizabeth Hart, but his mother refused to pay him his $5,000 inheritance until he would return to live with her.
22.
Hart Crane spent several weeks at their estate where he wrote a draft of the "Cape Hatteras" section, a key part of his panegyric poem.
23.
The work received poor reviews, and Hart Crane struggled with a sense of failure.
24.
Hart Crane found a place to start his synthesis in Brooklyn.
25.
Hart Crane's drinking had become worse during the late 1920s, while he was finishing The Bridge.
26.
Hart Crane visited his father, who had started an inn in the vicinity of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in 1931.
27.
Hart Crane still felt himself a failure, in part because he recommenced homosexual activities despite his relationship with Cowley.
28.
Just before noon on April 27,1932, Hart Crane jumped into the Gulf of Mexico.
29.
Hart Crane first read The Waste Land in the November 1922 edition of The Dial.
30.
Lovecraft, who would eventually voice concern over Hart Crane's premature aging due to alcohol abuse.
31.
Selections of Hart Crane's letters are available in many editions of his poetry.
32.
Hart Crane had a relatively well-developed rhetoric for the defense of his poems; here is an excerpt from "General Aims and Theories":.
33.
In mid-December 1926, Hart Crane visited William Murrell Fisher in Woodstock, a literary critic whom he first met via their mutual friend Gorham Munson.
34.
Hart Crane copied forty-two poems from the notebooks, which he borrowed from Fisher for a period of less than a month.
35.
Many of Hart Crane's poems consisted of lines and phrases taken from Greenberg's poems, always unattributed.
36.
Writer and critic Samuel R Delany argues Crane merely tried to draw attention to an unknown poet and wanted readers to experience for themselves the delight of realizing one of his influences without him telling them.
37.
Tennessee Williams said that he wanted to be "given back to the sea" at the "point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back".
38.
Hart Crane is the subject of The Broken Tower, a 2011 American student film by the actor James Franco who wrote, directed, and starred in the film which was the master's thesis project for his MFA in filmmaking at New York University.
39.
Hart Crane loosely based his script on Paul Mariani's 1999 nonfiction book The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane.