Hart Crane
American writer (1899–1932)
Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Inspired by the Romantics and his fellow Modernists, Crane wrote highly stylized poetry, often noted for its complexity. His collection White Buildings (1926), featuring "Chaplinesque", "At Melville's Tomb", "Repose of Rivers" and "Voyages", helped to cement his place in the avant-garde literary scene of the time. The long poem The Bridge (1930) is an epic inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge.
Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. He dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year and left for New York City, promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University. Crane took various jobs, including in copywriting and advertising. Throughout the early 1920s, various small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him among the avant-garde a respect that White Buildings ratified and strengthened. His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge, intended to be an uplifting counter to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). Initial critical reaction to it was mixed, with many praising the scope but criticizing the quality of the poems.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q380723. VIAF identifies the subject as 22140431. The Library of Congress control number is n80057229. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1899, 1932, 1926 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hart Crane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.