The
Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane by Paul L.
Mariani
In addition to several volumes of poetry, Paul
Mariani has also written biographies of major 20th-century
American poets: William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and John
Berryman. In his fourth biography, he takes on the life of Hart
Crane (1899-1932), a contemporary of Williams who held a similarly
pivotal role in the development of American literature's
avant-garde. "It would be difficult," Mariani suggests,
"to find a serious poet or reader of poetry in this country
today who has not been touched by something in Hart Crane's
music." (However, at the time, many critics--with some of
whom he had strained personal relationships--did not evaluate his
work so highly, which contributed in part to Crane's dramatic
suicidal leap off a ship at sea.) Crane loved New York, moving
there from his hometown of Cleveland as soon as he could; even
when financial straits forced him to return home to work for his
father, the "white buildings" of Manhattan loomed in his
imagination. The Broken Tower does a fine job of recreating
the passionate energy and vitality of Crane's life. Mariani weaves
lines from Crane's letters and poems into his narrative
throughout, and while he does not skimp in his accounts of the
poet's alcoholism and promiscuous sex life with other men, he
treats these matters simply as components of the poet's complex
personality.
O
My Land, My Friends : The Selected Letters of Hart Crane
by Hart Crane, Langdon Hammer (Editor), Brom Weber (Editor),
Weber Brom
Over 300 letters by one of America's greatest
poets. Crane, whose career began with the Great War and ended with
the Great Depression, died at the age of 32. But in that short
time, he trafficked with many of the era's most significant
figures: Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, e.e. cummings,
Marianne Moore, Eugene O'Neill, Katherine Anne Porter, Alfred
Stieglitz, Gertrude Stein and Yvor Winters among them. A document
as passionate, revealing, and ultimately as tragic as Crane's
short life.
Hart
Crane, and the Homosexual Text : New Thresholds, New Anatomies
by Thomas E. Yingling
"Canonized for being insufficiently American
although he took America as his subject, chastised for obscurity
by readers who would not allow or would not read homosexual
meanings, Crane embodies many understandings of America, and of
the predicament of the gay writer."--Voice Literary
Supplement
"A brilliant critical model for
understanding how textuality and sexuality can produce pervasive
effects on each other in the writing of a figure like
Crane."--Michael Moon, Duke Universit
