US poet whose long and mystical poem The Bridge was written in 1930. Using the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol, he attempted to link man's present with his past, in an epic continuum. His better works show the influence of the French Symbolists, and T.S.Eliot, as well, differing though especially in Crane's emphasis on the positive and even the ecstatic. His master poem The Bridge follows in the tradition of Walt Whitman, in fifteen sections moving from New York to California, featuring historical figures, as well as technological and natural wonders.

Hart Crane drowned after jumping overboard from a steamer  bringing him back to the US after a visit to Mexico. His suicide followed a life in which he shuttled from one varied job to another and cut short the career of one of America's most promising young writers.

From "The Bridge"
Poem: To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty-

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away ;
-Til elevators drop us from our day...

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen ;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride-
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee !

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momentarily, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caraqvan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene,
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn...
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon ...Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise :
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and alter, of thy fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choring strings !)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry-

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path-condense eternity :
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited ;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year...

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.