Hart
Crane, the son of a drug store owner, was born in Garretsville, Ohio
in 1899. He worked in a shipyard and in advertising before moving
to New York City in 1923. His first collection
of poems, White Buildings, was published in 1926. A second
volume of
poems, The Bridge, appeared in
1930.
An
alcoholic, Crane became involved with the wife of his friend, Malcolm
Cowley. The couple went to Mexico but on their return Crane committed
suicide by jumping from the ship Orizaba
on 27th April 1932.
(1)
Malcolm
Cowley, Hart Crane: The Roaring Boy (1934)
Hart drank to write: he drank to invoke the visions that
his poems are intended to convey. But the recipe could be followed
for a few years at the most, and it was completely effective only
for two periods of about a month each, in 1926
and 1927, when working at top speed he finished most of the poems
included in The Bridge. After that more and more
alcohol was needed, so much of it that when the visions came he was
incapable of putting them on paper.
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