Time’s rendings, time’s blendings they
construe
As final reckonings of fire and snow…
(from “The River” in The Bridge)
Hart
Crane (1899-1932) was born on Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a well-to-do chocolate
manufacturer who expected his son to follow his footsteps into the family
business. That didn’t happen; Crane had no intention of that happening.
Instead, he turned his attention to what he was most interested in – writing,
and especially poetry.
His
most well-known work is The Bridge, a
series of poems on the American experience. In a sense, he was trying to write
the Great American Poem, much like his novelist peers were trying to write the
Great American Novel, which might have already been written (Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in
1885) (I realize that a parenthetical statement like that may cause
controversy). Critics immediately found fault with The Bridge, for all kinds of reasons. They still do.
I
had never read the entire work until recently. In high school, our junior
English class read a few excerpts from the volume, which includes short poems
on Rip Van Winkle, the Brooklyn Bridge (a kind of homage to Walt Whitman),
Powhatan’s daughter, the Mississippi River, Cape Hatteras and a number of other
subjects. As The Poetry Foundation’s entry on Crane points out, it was perhaps
inevitable that the Great American Poem would fall short of its goals.
To
continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Photograph: Hart Crane, with the
Brooklyn Bridge in the background.
No comments:
Post a Comment