White Buildings was the first collection (1926) of poetry by Hart Crane, an American modernist poet, critical to both lyrical and language poetic traditions.
Harold Hart Crane was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem, in the vein of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has been hailed by playwrights, poets, and literary critics alike, as being one of the most influential poets of his generation.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, and Tina Darragh.
The book features well-known pieces like "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," the "Voyages" series, and some of his most famous lyrics including "My Grandmother's Love Letters" and "Chaplinesque." Harold Bloom has argued that this collection alone, if perhaps taken with his later lyric, 'The Broken Tower,' could have secured Crane's reputation as one of the best American poets of the 20th century.[1]
Contained in Hart Crane's first collection of poems, White Buildings (1926), "Voyages" was composed across six years (1921–1926), with sections published as early as 1923. Containing one of Crane's most famous lyrics, "Voyages: II," this love-cycle of six poems was largely fueled by his love affair with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner.
Harold Bloom is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than forty books, including twenty books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
The last new poem meant to be published in Hart Crane's life, "The Broken Tower" (1932) has been widely acknowledged as one of the best lyrics of Crane's last years, if not his career. In keeping with the varieties and difficulties of Crane criticism, the poem has been interpreted widely—as death ode, life ode, process poem, visionary poem, poem on failed vision—but its biographical impetus out of Crane's first heterosexual affair is generally undisputed. Written early in the year, the poem was rejected by Poetry, and only appeared in print after Crane's famous suicide by water.
Preface
Eugene O'Neill was happy to help Crane by writing a preface to White Buildings, but, increasingly frustrated with his failure to articulate an understanding of the poems, left it to Allen Tate to finish the piece.[2]
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into U.S. drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day's Journey into Night is often numbered on the short list of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
John Orley Allen Tate, known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate from 1943 to 1944.
Reviews
According to the Poetry Foundation, "this work earned [Crane] substantial respect as an imposing stylist, one whose lyricism and imagery recalled the French Romantics Baudelaire and Rimbaud".[3]
The Poetry Foundation is a Chicago-based American foundation created to promote poetry in the wider culture. It was formed from Poetry magazine, which it continues to publish, with a 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Ruth Lilly.
One notable review of the book was mixed. In The New Republic, Edmund Wilson wrote that Crane had "a remarkable style... almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style...[but it's] not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all".[4] Crane responded to this criticism by calling Wilson's article "half-baked".[5]
The New Republic is an American magazine of commentary on politics and the arts, published since 1914, with influence on American political and cultural thinking. Founded in 1914 by leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between a humanitarian progressivism and an intellectual scientism, and ultimately discarded the latter. Through the 1980s and '90s, the magazine incorporated elements of "Third Way" neoliberalism and conservatism.
Edmund Wilson was an American writer and critic who explored Freudian and Marxist themes. He influenced many American authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose unfinished work he edited for publication. His scheme for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through the efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death.
The poet and critic Randall Jarrell singled out "the mesmeric rhetoric of [the poem] 'Voyages II' [as] one of the most beautiful of all of those poems in which love, death, and sleep 'are fused for an instant in one floating flower'".[6]
Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
Notes
↑ See Bloom's 'Introduction' to The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (2000) ed. Mark Simon
↑ p. 227, Mariani, Paul. The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane. (1999)
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.
Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.
John Crowe Ransom was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist.
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region. The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.
Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.
Paterson is an epic poem by American poet William Carlos Williams published, in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958. The origin of the poem was an eighty-five line long poem written in 1926, after Williams had read and been influenced by James Joyce's novel Ulysses. As he continued writing lyric poetry, Williams spent increasing amounts of time on Paterson, honing his approach to it both in terms of style and structure. While The Cantos of Ezra Pound and The Bridge by Hart Crane could be considered partial models, Williams was intent on a documentary method that differed from both these works, one that would mirror "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city."
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
James Vincent Tate was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Mills of the Kavanaughs is the third book of poems written by the American poet Robert Lowell. Like Lowell's previous book, Lord Weary's Castle, the poetry in Kavanaughs was also ornate, formal, dense, and metered. All of the poems are dramatic monologues, and the literary scholar Helen Vendler noted that the poems in this volume "were clearly influenced by Frost's narrative poems as well as by Browning."
Lord Weary's Castle, Robert Lowell's second book of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 when Lowell was only thirty. Robert Giroux, who was the publisher of Lowell's wife at the time, Jean Stafford, also became Lowell's publisher after he saw the manuscript for Lord Weary's Castle and was very impressed; he later stated that Lord Weary's Castle was the most successful book of poems that he ever published.
The Bridge, first published in 1930 by the Black Sun Press, is Hart Crane's first, and only, attempt at a long poem.
Eleanor Ross Taylor was an American poet who published six collections of verse from 1960 to 2009. Her work received little recognition until 1998, but thereafter received several major poetry prizes. Describing her most recent poetry collection, Kevin Prufer writes, "I cannot imagine the serious reader — poet or not — who could leave Captive Voices unmoved by the work of this supremely gifted poet who skips so nimbly around our sadnesses and fears, never directly addressing them, suggesting, instead, their complex resistance to summary."
Marguerite Frances Cowley, known as Peggy Cowley and also as Peggy Baird and by her first married name Peggy Johns, was an American landscape painter. She was married to poet-playwright Orrick Johns and writer Malcolm Cowley and was the lover of playwright Eugene O'Neill and poet Hart Crane.
Stephanie Burt is a literary critic, poet, professor at Harvard University and transgender activist. The New York Times has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation."
The Broken Tower is a 2011 American biographical drama film directed, written, produced, edited by and starring James Franco. The film was made by Franco as his Masters thesis for his MFA in filmmaking from New York University. The film is about American poet Hart Crane. Franco appears in the starring role as Crane along with Michael Shannon as one of Crane's lovers. The Broken Tower made its world premiere in April 2011 at Boston College. It was shown at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) in June and released on DVD in 2012. The film includes the recitation by Franco of several of Crane's poems both as voice-over additions to the film, as well as actual readings of several poems rendered by Franco as portraying Crane himself.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
