American poet. Known as Hart, but his full name was Harold Hart Crane.

"...Crane was the last, and easily the finest, of our poets to whom the full-throated sublime seemed to come as naturally as the air he breathed."
-Eric Ormsby in The New Criterion Vol. 19, No. 6, February 2001

Born July 21, 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio. He lived with his mother's mother until 1916, when his parents divorced and he moved to New York City.

His poetry was very structured. It was celebratory, somewhat mystical, and interesting in its combination of the transcendent and the artificial.

He killed himself by throwing himself into the sea from a boat on April 27, 1932. Some people like to think that he was trying to "merge with the universal wholeness" or some such. Likely he was drunk and depressed. He had been staying in Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship (and was heading back to New York)- a very unproductive time when he did little but drink.

The fact that he was a homosexual is not as important as many people make it out to be.

You can get a volume of the Complete Poems of Hart Crane- newer editions feature an introduction by the literary world's chief windbag, the loveable Harold Bloom. It even has unpublished, uncollected, and incomplete works. In his time, however, Crane had White Buildings, The Bridge, and Key West published.

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