Hart Crane
b. 1899 d. 1932

As your Norton describes, Hart Crane “defined himself as a follower of Walt Whitman in the visionary, prophetic, affirmative American tradition, aiming at nothing less than to master the techniques of modernism while reversing its direction—to make it positive, celebratory, and deeply meshed with contemporary American life without sacrificing technical complexity or richness” (2190).

Choose a section from “The Tunnel,” which we read as a class, and describe how it is “technically complex,” but “rich.”

Some of you found the “complexity” of Crane’s poetry to be off-putting; some of you described his language obfuscating. However, there are parts of “The Tunnel” in which Crane describes the New York City he sees around him, in relative comprehensible terms: “Be minimum then, to swim the hiving swarms/Out of the Square, the Circle burning bright--/avoid the glass doors gyring to your right,/Where boxed alone for a second, eyes take fright” (lines 24-27). What is he describing about the experience of riding the subway and being in the subway tunnel? What part of that experience does he describe here?

Think again about the claim your Norton makes, that Crane was trying to carry on a tradition begun by Whitman. What similarities do you see between the works of the two poets? Whose writing seems more optimistic, more positive about the American experience and future? Why might that be?

How is Hart Crane’s poetry different from the works of other poets you’ve read this term? If his poetry is “modern,” what about it, do you think, makes it so?

What features of the increasingly industrial American city of the early-twentieth century do you see in Crane’s poetry?

Recall our discussion of bridges as powerful symbols of the American experience of the early-twentieth century. What do bridges do? What about their structure? Hart Crane’s long quasi-mythological poem was called The Bridge. Why? Why was this an apt metaphor for him, in his epic American poem?