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97-591: White Buildings was the first collection (1926) of poetry by Hart Crane , an American modernist poet, critical to both lyrical and language poetic traditions. The book features well-known pieces like "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," the " Voyages " series, and some of his most famous lyrics including "My Grandmother's Love Letters" and "Chaplinesque." Harold Bloom has argued that this collection alone, if perhaps taken with his later lyric, ' The Broken Tower ,' could have secured Crane's reputation as one of

194-746: A MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry , the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature , the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015. Walcott was born and raised in Castries , Saint Lucia , in the West Indies ,

291-765: A New York Times book review of Walcott's Selected Poems . While he praised Walcott's writing in Sea Grapes and The Arkansas Testament , Logan had mostly negative things to say about Walcott's poetry, calling Omeros "clumsy" and Another Life "pretentious". Logan concluded with: "No living poet has written verse more delicately rendered or distinguished than Walcott, though few individual poems seem destined to be remembered." Most reviews of Walcott's work are more positive. For instance, in The New Yorker review of The Poetry of Derek Walcott , Adam Kirsch had high praise for Walcott's oeuvre, describing his style in

388-752: A Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962) attracted international attention. His play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970) was produced on NBC-TV in the United States the year it was published. Makak is the protagonist in this play; and "Makak"s condition represents the condition of the colonized natives under the oppressive forces of the powerful colonizers". In 1971 it was produced by the Negro Ensemble Company off-Broadway in New York City; it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play". The following year, Walcott won an OBE from

485-455: A Jewish Hospital in New York was a Rimbaud in embryo ... Fisher has shown me an amazing amount of material, some of which I am copying and will show you when I get back." Morris Greenberg, Samuel's brother, had given five of Samuel's notebooks to Fisher so that he could get them published. Crane copied forty-two poems from the notebooks, which he borrowed from Fisher for a period of less than

582-437: A divorce, she joined Crane. The two began a romantic relationship on December 25, 1931. As far as is known, she was his only heterosexual partner. " The Broken Tower ", one of his last published poems, emerged from that affair. Crane still felt himself a failure, in part because he recommenced his homosexual activities despite his relationship with Cowley. He claimed he would commit suicide multiple times. "The Broken Tower"

679-534: A draft of the "Cape Hatteras" section, a key part of his panegyric poem. In late June that year, Crane returned from the south of France to Paris. Crosby noted in his journal, "Hart C. back from Marseilles where he slept with his thirty sailors and he began again to drink Cutty Sark ." Crane got drunk at the Cafe Select and fought with waiters over his tab. When the Paris police were called, he fought with them and

776-411: A foreword to it; and many critics since have used Crane's difficulty as an excuse for a quick dismissal. O'Neill did, however, write a draft for such a foreword. The text said of Crane that "the great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader, is naturally, the style. The theme never appears in explicit statement". The publisher Harcourt rejected White Buildings , with Harrison Smith writing Crane

873-432: A kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy." Thomas Yingling objects to the traditional, New Critical and Eliotic readings of Crane, arguing that the "American myth criticism and formalist readings" have "depolarized and normalized our reading of American poetry, making any homosexual readings seem perverse ." Even more than

970-620: A leading candidate, was elected to the post. Within days, The Daily Telegraph reported that she had alerted journalists to the harassment cases. Under severe media and academic pressure, Padel resigned. Padel was the first woman to be elected to the Oxford post, and some journalists attributed the criticism of her to misogyny and a gender war at Oxford. They said that a male poet would not have been so criticized, as she had reported published information, not rumour. Numerous respected poets, including Seamus Heaney and Al Alvarez , published

1067-607: A letter of support for Walcott in The Times Literary Supplement , and criticized the press furore. Other commentators suggested that both poets were casualties of the media interest in an internal university affair because the story "had everything, from sex claims to allegations of character assassination". Simon Armitage and other poets expressed regret at Padel's resignation. Walcott died at his home in Cap Estate, St. Lucia, on 17 March 2017. He

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1164-665: A loan of $ 1,000. After parting with the Opffers, Crane left for Paris in early 1929, but continued to struggle with his mental health. His drinking became notably worse during the late 1920s, while he was finishing The Bridge . He visited his father, who had started an inn in the vicinity of Chagrin Falls, Ohio , in 1931. Crane visited Mexico in 1931–32 on a Guggenheim Fellowship , and his drinking continued as he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. When Peggy Cowley , wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley , agreed to

1261-585: A month. Many of Crane's poems consisted of lines and phrases taken from Greenberg's poems, always unattributed. Crane's poem "Emblems of Conduct", the third in White Buildings , consisted solely of rearranged lines from Greenberg's poems. The plagiarism went unnoticed for decades until Marc Simon published Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane and the Lost Manuscripts in 1978, detailing how Crane copied from Greenberg. Scholarly interpretation over

1358-630: A new light shed From penitence, must needs bring pain, And with it song of minor, broken strain. But you who hear the lamp whisper thru night Can trace paths tear-wet, and forget all blight. Hart Crane's "C33" as published in Bruno's Weekly in 1917. Crane's first published work was the poem "C33", which was published in the Greenwich journal Bruno's Weekly in 1917 in a feature entitled "Oscar Wilde: Poems in His Praise". The poem

1455-407: A non-existent past, then time passes us by." Walcott's epic book-length poem Omeros was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem very loosely echoes and references Homer and some of his major characters from The Iliad . Some of the poem's major characters include the island fishermen Achille and Hector, the retired English officer Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, the housemaid Helen,

1552-424: A personal or political problem, though, Yingling argues that such "biases" obscure much of what the poems make clear; he cites, for instance, the last lines of "My Grandmother's Love Letters" from White Buildings as a haunting description of estrangement from the norms of ( heterosexual ) family life: Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand; And so I stumble. And

1649-468: A poem is coming on... you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you're taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity." Walcott said that his writing was influenced by the work of the American poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop , who were also friends. He published more than twenty plays,

1746-404: A powerful elation at having the privilege of writing about places and people for the first time and, simultaneously, having behind them the tradition of knowing how well it can be done—by a Defoe , a Dickens , a Richardson . Walcott identified as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage. In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in

1843-634: A professional artist provided an inspiring example for him. Walcott greatly admired Cézanne and Giorgione and sought to learn from them. Walcott's painting was later exhibited at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City, along with the art of other writers, in a 2007 exhibition named The Writer's Brush: Paintings and Drawing by Writers . He studied as a writer, becoming "an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English" and strongly influenced by modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound . Walcott had an early sense of

1940-491: A response printed in the newspaper. By 19, Walcott had self-published his first two collections with the aid of his mother, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He sold copies to his friends and covered the costs. He later commented: I went to my mother and said, "I'd like to publish a book of poems, and I think it's going to cost me two hundred dollars." She

2037-728: A scholarship to study at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica . After graduation, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he became a critic, teacher and journalist. He founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and remained active with its board of directors. Exploring the Caribbean and its history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context, his collection In

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2134-448: A second time to Margaret Maillard in 1962, who worked as an almoner in a hospital. Together they had two daughters, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and Anna Walcott-Hardy, before divorcing in 1976. In 1976, Walcott married for a third time, to actress Norline Metivier; they divorced in 1993. His companion until his death was Sigrid Nama, a former art gallery owner. Walcott was also known for his passion for travelling to countries around

2231-533: A secretary for a stockbroker visiting California. Crane's mother, following her second marriage breakup, was living in the Los Angeles area . He revealed his homosexuality to her, causing a confrontation and Crane sneaking out on May 15, 1928, never to see her again. He later found out about the death of his grandmother, Elizabeth Hart, but his mother refused to pay him the $ 5,000 inheritance until he returned to live with her. He managed to convince her to give him

2328-518: A sense of failure. His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge , intended to be an uplifting counter to Eliot's The Waste Land . The Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem's central symbol and its poetic starting point. Crane found a place to start his synthesis in Brooklyn. Arts patron Otto H. Kahn gifted him $ 2,000 to begin work on the panegyric poem, though he requested

2425-422: A sequence of erotic poems. They were written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner, whom "Voyages" is generally considered to be about. "Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land , he also said it

2522-427: A settlement. In 2009, Walcott was a leading candidate for the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry . He withdrew his candidacy after reports of the accusations against him of sexual harassment from 1981 and 1996. When the media learned that pages from an American book on the topic were sent anonymously to a number of Oxford academics, this aroused their interest in the university's decisions. Ruth Padel , also

2619-542: A slave ship that is headed for the Americas; also, in Book Five of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel experiences in a variety of cities around the world, including Lisbon , London, Dublin , Rome, and Toronto. Composed in a variation on terza rima , the work explores the themes that run throughout Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, the fragmentation of Caribbean identity, and

2716-670: A thing as a great style which was ... not ... applied to any subject at all." Crane returned to New York in 1928 following a hurricane which left the Cuban residence damaged, and began living with friends and taking temporary jobs as a copywriter, or living off unemployment and the charity of friends and his father. For a time he lived in Brooklyn at 77 Willow Street until his lover, Opffer, invited him to live in Opffer's father's home at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights . Crane

2813-550: A very young age: I was preadolescent, ten or eleven years old. I still remember the extraordinary delight, the extraordinary force that Crane and Blake brought to me—in particular Blake's rhetoric in the longer poems—though I had no notion what they were about. I picked up a copy of The Collected Poems of Hart Crane in the Bronx Library. I still remember when I lit upon the page with the extraordinary trope, "O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits / The agile precincts of

2910-554: A vocation as a writer. In the poem "Midsummer" (1984), he wrote: Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen, that all experience was kindling to the fire of the Muse. At 14, Walcott published his first poem, a Miltonic , religious poem, in the newspaper The Voice of St Lucia . An English Catholic priest condemned the Methodist-inspired poem as blasphemous in

3007-439: A worker in his father's factory. In 1925, he briefly lived with Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate . The two had a dispute with Crane due to the mess his belongings made throughout the house. Additionally, Crane and Tate had a disagreement over the negative outlook of T. S. Eliot 's work. This prompted them to leave two letters under his door requesting that he move out, which he complied with. He wrote his mother and grandmother in

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3104-482: A year before his death. Contemporary opinion was mixed, with poets including Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens criticizing his work and others, including William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings , praising it. William Rose Benét wrote that, with The Bridge , Crane "failed in creating what might have been a truly great poem" but that it "reveals potencies in the author that may make his next work even more remarkable." His last work, " The Broken Tower " (1932),

3201-578: Is "a genuine poet ... [but White Buildings ] is really the most perplexing kind of poetry." A young Tennessee Williams , then falling in love with Crane's poetry, could "hardly understand a single line—of course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect." Crane was aware that his poetry was difficult. Some of his essays originated as encouraging epistles, explications and stylistic apologies to editors, updates to his patron, and both well-considered or impulsive letters to friends. It

3298-516: Is generally undisputed. Written early in the year and finished two months prior to his death, the poem was rejected by Poetry Magazine , and only appeared in print (in the June 1932 edition of The New Republic ) after Crane's death by water. Crane and Peggy both decided to return to New York on the steamship Orizaba , in April 1932 because Crane's stepmother had invited him back to settle

3395-403: Is melting into what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That is the ecstasy... Ultimately, it's what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.' That's always there. It's a benediction, a transference. It's gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature." He also notes: "if one thinks

3492-649: Is mostly to be found in his letters: he corresponded regularly with Allen Tate , Yvor Winters , and Gorham Munson , and shared critical dialogues with Eugene O'Neill , William Carlos Williams , E. E. Cummings , Sherwood Anderson , Kenneth Burke , Waldo Frank , Harriet Monroe , Marianne Moore , and Gertrude Stein . He was also an acquaintance of H. P. Lovecraft , who would eventually voice concern over Crane's premature aging due to alcohol abuse. Selections of Crane's letters are available in many editions of his poetry. His two most famous stylistic defenses emerged from correspondences: his "General Aims and Theories" (1925)

3589-599: Is named after Oscar Wilde's cell in The Ballad of Reading Gaol and his name appeared misspelled in print as "Harold H Crone". The style he would use in his later books is apparent in poems written at the time. Crane dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year in December 1916 and left for New York City , promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University . His parents, in

3686-511: Is shown to have much information but truly knows nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is unable to synthesize it or apply it to his life as a colonised person. Walcott notes of growing up in West Indian culture: What we were deprived of was also our privilege. There was a great joy in making a world that so far, up to then, had been undefined... My generation of West Indian writers has felt such

3783-519: Is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension." There is also some mention of it, though it is not so much presented as a critical neologism , in his letter to Harriet Monroe: "The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology." L. S. Dembo's influential study of The Bridge , Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (1960), reads this 'logic' well within

3880-440: Is the last poem meant to be published by poet Hart Crane in 1932. He intended it to be "an epic of the modern consciousness." In keeping with the varieties and difficulties of Crane criticism, the poem has been interpreted widely—as a death ode, life ode, process poem, visionary poem, and a poem on failed vision—but its biographical impetus out of Crane's first heterosexual affair (with Peggy Cowley, estranged wife of Malcolm Cowley)

3977-517: Is the volume of Walcott's that usually receives the most critical praise, Kirsch believes Midsummer to be his best book. In 2013 Dutch filmmaker Ida Does released Poetry is an Island , a feature documentary film about Walcott's life and the ever-present influence of his birthplace of St Lucia . In 1954 Walcott married Fay Moston, a secretary, and they had a son, the St. Lucian painter Peter Walcott. The marriage ended in divorce in 1959. Walcott married

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4074-702: The Poetry Foundation website, analyzing the poem based strictly on the content of the text itself and not on outside political or cultural matters. In mid-December 1926, Crane visited William Murrell Fisher in Woodstock, a literary critic whom he first met via their mutual friend Gorham Munson . There, Fisher shared with Crane multiple manuscripts of poems by Samuel Greenberg ,a little-known poet who had died in 1917. Writing to Gorham Munson on December 20, Crane wrote "This poet, Grünberg, [ sic ] which Fisher nursed until he died of consumption at

4171-549: The Shelley of my age, / must lay his heart out for my bed and board." Lowell thought that Crane was the most important American poet of the generation to come of age in the 1920s, stating that "[Crane] got out more than anybody else ... he somehow got New York City ; he was at the center of things in the way that no other poet was." Lowell also described Crane as being "less limited than any other poet of his generation." Tennessee Williams said that he wanted to be "given back to

4268-692: The University of Essex . As a part of St Lucia's Independence Day celebrations, in February 2016, he became one of the first knights of the Order of Saint Lucia . Methodism and spirituality have played a significant role from the beginning in Walcott's work. He commented: "I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation , a religious vocation." Describing his writing process, he wrote: "the body feels it

4365-635: The British government for his work. He was hired as a teacher by Boston University in the United States, where he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 1981. That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the United States. Walcott taught literature and writing at Boston University for more than two decades, publishing new books of poetry and plays on a regular basis. Walcott retired from his position at Boston University in 2007. He became friends with other poets, including

4462-593: The English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or 'a world'; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language." Walcott noted that he, Brodsky, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney , who all taught in the United States, were a band of poets "outside the American experience". The poetry critic William Logan critiqued Walcott's work in

4559-602: The French Romantics Baudelaire and Rimbaud". One notable review of the book was mixed. In The New Republic , Edmund Wilson wrote that Crane had "a remarkable style.. almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style...[but it's] not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all". Crane responded to this criticism by calling Wilson's article "half-baked". The poet and critic Randall Jarrell singled out "the mesmeric rhetoric of [the poem] 'Voyages II' [as] one of

4656-748: The Russian expatriate Joseph Brodsky , who lived and worked in the U.S. after being exiled in the 1970s, and the Irishman Seamus Heaney , who also taught in Boston. Walcott's epic poem Omeros (1990), which loosely echoes and refers to characters from the Iliad , has been critically praised as his "major achievement." The book received praise from publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review , which chose Omeros as one of its "Best Books of 1990". Walcott

4753-542: The T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature . Derek Walcott held the Elias Ghanem Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2007. In 2008, Walcott gave the first Cola Debrot Lectures In 2009, Walcott began a three-year distinguished scholar-in-residence position at the University of Alberta . In 2010, he became Professor of Poetry at

4850-421: The West Indies as a colonized space. He discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of truly Indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: "We are all strangers here... Our bodies think in one language and move in another". The epistemological effects of colonization inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers . Mi-Jean, one of the eponymous brothers,

4947-534: The age away." Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. His father was a successful Ohio restaurateur and businessman who invented the Life Savers candy and held the patent , but sold it for $ 2,900 before the brand became popular. He made other candy and accumulated a fortune from the business with chocolate bars. Clarence Crane's sister, Alice Crane Williams ,

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5044-435: The alphabet every breath or two? In the minds of people who have sensitively read, seen, and experienced a great deal, isn't there a terminology something like short-hand as compared to usual description and dialectics, which the artist ought to be right in trusting as a reasonable connective agent toward fresh concepts, more inclusive evaluations? Monroe was not impressed, though she acknowledged that others were, and printed

5141-482: The avant-garde respect which was later cemented by the 1926 publication of White Buildings . On May 1, 1926, he went to Isla de la Juventud to reside in his mother's family residence there. He received a contract from Liveright Publishing to publish White Buildings in July. White Buildings contains many of Crane's most well-received and popular poems, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen", and "Voyages",

5238-669: The beginning of "East Coker", which is reminiscent of the final section of "The River", from The Bridge . Yvor Winters and Allen Tate both praised White Buildings but considered The Bridge to be a failure. Mid-century American poets, such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell , cited Crane as a significant influence. Both poets also wrote about Crane in their poetry. Berryman wrote him one of his famous elegies in The Dream Songs , and Lowell published his "Words for Hart Crane" in Life Studies (1959): "Who asks for me,

5335-416: The best American poets of the 20th century. Eugene O'Neill was happy to help Crane by writing a preface to White Buildings , but, increasingly frustrated with his failure to articulate an understanding of the poems, left it to Allen Tate to finish the piece. According to the Poetry Foundation , "this work earned [Crane] substantial respect as an imposing stylist, one whose lyricism and imagery recalled

5432-404: The blind man Seven Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and the author himself. Although the main narrative of the poem takes place on the island of St. Lucia, where Walcott was born and raised, Walcott also includes scenes from Brookline, Massachusetts (where Walcott was living and teaching at the time of the poem's composition), and the character Achille imagines a voyage from Africa onto

5529-406: 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

5626-663: The estate of his father, who had died the month prior. This was the same ship aboard which he had gone to Cuba in 1926. The Orizaba departed from Vera Cruz, Mexico on April 23 and stopped at Havana, Cuba on April 26. While aboard, Crane was assaulted after making sexual advances to a male crew member. Just before noon on April 27, 1932, Crane jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico . Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before jumping overboard. The ship

5723-449: The exchange alongside the poem: You find me testing metaphors, and poetic concept in general, too much by logic, whereas I find you pushing logic to the limit in a painfully intellectual search for emotion, for poetic motive. Crane had a relatively well-developed rhetoric for the defense of his poems; here is an excerpt from "General Aims and Theories": New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation. ...the voice of

5820-526: The familiar rhetoric of the Romantics : "The Logic of metaphor was simply the written form of the 'bright logic' of the imagination, the crucial sign stated, the Word made words.... As practiced, the logic of metaphor theory is reducible to a fairly simple linguistic principle: the symbolized meaning of an image takes precedence over its literal meaning; regardless of whether the vehicle of an image makes sense,

5917-630: The following manner: By combining the grammar of vision with the freedom of metaphor, Walcott produces a beautiful style that is also a philosophical style. People perceive the world on dual channels, Walcott's verse suggests, through the senses and through the mind, and each is constantly seeping into the other. The result is a state of perpetual magical thinking, a kind of Alice in Wonderland world where concepts have bodies and landscapes are always liable to get up and start talking. Kirsch calls Another Life Walcott's "first major peak" and analyzes

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6014-690: The intent and morality of Hart Crane's actions varies. Writer and critic Samuel R. Delany argues Crane merely tried to draw attention to an unknown poet and wanted readers to experience for themselves the delight of realizing one of his influences without him telling them. Crane was admired by artists including Eugene O'Neill , Kenneth Burke , Edmund Wilson , E. E. Cummings , Tennessee Williams and William Carlos Williams . Although Crane had his sharp critics, among them Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound , Moore did publish his work, as did T. S. Eliot, who, moving even further out of Pound's sphere, may have borrowed some of Crane's imagery for Four Quartets , in

6111-485: The introduction to the centennial edition of the Complete Poems of Hart Crane . Thomas Lux has stated, "If the devil came to me and said 'Tom, you can be dead and Hart can be alive,' I'd take the deal in a heartbeat if the devil promised, when arisen, Hart would have to go straight into A.A. " Derek Walcott Sir Derek Alton Walcott KCSL OBE OM OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017)

6208-503: The lark's return." I was just swept away by it, by the Marlovian rhetoric . I still have the flavor of that book in me. Indeed it's the first book I ever owned. I begged my oldest sister to give it to me, and I still have the old black and gold edition she gave me for my birthday back in 1942 . . . I suppose the only poet of the twentieth century that I could secretly set above Yeats and Stevens would be Hart Crane. Bloom also authored

6305-578: The majority of which have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them address, either directly or indirectly, the liminal status of the West Indies in the post-colonial period. Through poetry he also explores the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy. In his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture", discussing art and theatre in his native region (from Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays ), Walcott reflects on

6402-572: The middle of their divorce proceedings, were upset. Crane took various copywriting jobs and moved between friends' apartments in Manhattan. Crane's mother and father were constantly fighting, and they divorced on April 14, 1917. The same year, he attempted to enlist in the military, but was rejected due to being a minor. He worked in a munitions plant until the end of World War I . Between 1917 and 1924, he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, working as an advertising copywriter and

6499-593: The money and left for Europe towards late November and intended to live in Majorca , but instead went first to London then to Paris. In Paris in February 1929, Harry Crosby , who with his wife Caresse Crosby owned the fine arts press Black Sun Press , offered Crane the use of their country retreat, Le Moulin du Soleil in Ermenonville . They hoped he could use the time to concentrate on completing The Bridge . Crane spent several weeks at their estate where he wrote

6596-574: The most beautiful of all of those poems in which love, death, and sleep 'are fused for an instant in one floating flower ' ". This poetry -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Hart Crane 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

6693-445: The motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor,' which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which

6790-478: The painterly qualities of Walcott's imagery from his earliest work through to later books such as Tiepolo's Hound . Kirsch also explores the post-colonial politics in Walcott's work, calling him "the postcolonial writer par excellence". Kirsch calls the early poem "A Far Cry from Africa" a turning point in Walcott's development as a poet. Like Logan, Kirsch is critical of Omeros , which he believes Walcott fails to successfully sustain over its entirety. Although Omeros

6887-499: The play Pantomime (1978), he uses the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture and what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge to begin again, salvage the best of other cultures and make something new. These images recur in later work as well. He writes: "If we continue to sulk and say, Look at what the slave-owner did, and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels that glorify

6984-423: The present, if it is to be known, must be caught at the risk of speaking in idioms and circumlocutions sometimes shocking to the scholar and historians of logic. As a child, he had a sexual relationship with a man. Criticism since the late 20th century has suggested reading Crane's poems—" The Broken Tower ", "My Grandmother's Love Letters", the " Voyages " series, and others—with an eye to homosexual meanings in

7081-480: The rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter. Brian Reed has contributed to a project of critical reintegration of queer criticism with other critical methods, suggesting that an overemphasis on the sexual biography of Crane's poetry can skew a broader appreciation of his overall work. In one example of Reed's approach, he published a close reading of Crane's lyric poem, "Voyages", (a love poem that Crane wrote for his lover Emil Opffer) on

7178-438: The reader is expected to grasp its tenor." The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea. From "Repose of Rivers" from White Buildings (1926) The publication of White Buildings was delayed by Eugene O'Neill 's struggle (and eventual failure) to articulate his appreciation in

7275-472: The residence opposite the Hart's. Hart Crane began attending East High School around 1913–1914. He has woven rose-vines About the empty heart of night, And vented his long mellowed wines Of dreaming on the desert white With searing sophistry. And he tented with far truths he would form The transient bosoms from the thorny tree. O Materna! to enrich thy gold head And wavering shoulders with

7372-430: The river! It's really a magnificent place to live. This section of Brooklyn is very old, but all the houses are in splendid condition and have not been invaded by foreigners... Based on Crane's letters, New York was where he felt most at home. Additionally, much of his poetry takes place there. Throughout the early 1920s, many small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him among

7469-557: The role of the poet in a post-colonial world. In this epic, Walcott speaks in favour of unique Caribbean cultures and traditions to challenge the modernity that existed as a consequence of colonialism. Walcott's work has received praise from major poets including Robert Graves , who wrote that Walcott "handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most, if not any, of his contemporaries", and Joseph Brodsky , who praised Walcott's work, writing: "For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in

7566-477: The scope but criticizing the quality of the poems. On April 27, 1932, Crane, in an inebriated state, jumped off the steamship USS Orizaba and into the Gulf of Mexico while the ship was en route to New York. He left no suicide note, but witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal. Throughout his life, he had multiple homosexual relations, many of which were described by, or otherwise influenced, his poetry. He had one known female partner, Peggy Cowley , around

7663-426: The sea" at the "point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back". One of Williams's last plays, a "ghost play" titled Steps Must Be Gentle , explores Crane's relationship with his mother. In a 1991 interview with Antonio Weiss of The Paris Review , the literary critic Harold Bloom talked about how Crane, along with William Blake , initially sparked his interest in literature at

7760-521: The son of Alix (Maarlin) and Warwick Walcott. He had a twin brother, the playwright Roderick Walcott , and a sister, Pamela Walcott. His family is of English, Dutch and African descent, reflecting the complex colonial history of the island that he explores in his poetry. His mother, a teacher, loved the arts and often recited poetry around the house. His father was a civil servant and a talented painter. He died when Walcott and his brother were one year old, and were left to be raised by their mother. Walcott

7857-547: The spring of 1924: Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the Statue of Liberty, way down the harbour, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right! All of the great new skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are marshaled directly across from you, and there is a constant stream of tugs, liners, sail boats, etc in procession before you on

7954-405: The text. Queer theorist Tim Dean argues that the obscurity of Crane's style owes partially to the necessities of being a semi-public homosexual—not quite closeted , but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open: "The intensity responsible for Crane's particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces

8051-526: The world. He split his time between New York, Boston, and St. Lucia, and incorporated the influences of different locations into his pieces of work. In 1982, a Harvard sophomore accused Walcott of sexual harassment in September 1981. She alleged that after she refused a sexual advance from him, she was given the only C in the class. In 1996 a student at Boston University sued Walcott for sexual harassment and "offensive sexual physical contact". The two reached

8148-401: Was "so damned dead", an impasse, and characterized by a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities". Crane's self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America". Edmund Wilson said Crane had "a style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style, if there could be such

8245-830: Was 87. He was given a state funeral on Saturday, 25 March, with a service at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Castries and burial at Morne Fortune . In 1993, a public square and park located in central Castries, Saint Lucia, was named Derek Walcott Square . A documentary film, Poetry Is an Island: Derek Walcott , by filmmaker Ida Does , was produced to honour him and his legacy in 2013. The Saint Lucia National Trust acquired Walcott's childhood home at 17 Chaussée Road, Castries, in November 2015, renovating it before opening it to

8342-576: Was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature . His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain ,

8439-498: Was a composer and literary editor. In 1894, the family moved to Warren, Ohio where his father opened a maple syrup company, which he sold in 1908 to Corn Products Refining Company . In April 1911, his father opened a chocolate manufacturing and retailing company, the Crane Chocolate Company. The family moved to Cleveland in 1911, into a house at 1709 East 115th Street. In 1913, Clarence Crane's parents purchased

8536-488: Was about 300 miles (500 km) from Cuba. An article the following day from the New York Times linked his death to his father's. His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone at Park Cemetery outside Garrettsville, Portage County, Ohio includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899–1932 lost at sea". Crane was heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot , in particular The Waste Land . The Bridge

8633-717: Was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, the second Caribbean writer to receive the honour after Saint-John Perse , who was born in Guadeloupe , received the award in 1960. The Nobel committee described Walcott's work as "a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment". He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004. His later poetry collections include Tiepolo's Hound (2000), illustrated with copies of his watercolours; The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2010), which received

8730-445: Was beaten. They arrested and jailed him, fining him 800 francs. After Hart had spent six days in prison at La Santé , Crosby paid Crane's fine and advanced him money for the passage back to the United States, where he finished The Bridge . In January 1930, the work was published by Black Sun Press in Paris and subsequently by Boni & Liveright in the United States in April. The work received poor reviews, and Crane struggled with

8827-505: Was brought up in Methodist schools. His mother, who was a teacher at a Methodist elementary school, provided her children with an environment where their talents could be nurtured. Walcott's family was part of a minority Methodist community, who felt overshadowed by the dominant Catholic culture of the island established during French colonial rule. As a young man Walcott trained as a painter, mentored by Harold Simmons , whose life as

8924-404: Was intended to be a more optimistic view of society than that of The Waste Land . He first read The Waste Land in the November 1922 edition of The Dial . Walt Whitman , William Blake , Ralph Waldo Emerson , and Emily Dickinson were also particularly influential to Crane. As a teenager, Crane also read Plato , Honoré de Balzac , and Percy Bysshe Shelley . Crane's critical effort

9021-494: Was just a seamstress and a schoolteacher, and I remember her being very upset because she wanted to do it. Somehow she got it—a lot of money for a woman to have found on her salary. She gave it to me, and I sent off to Trinidad and had the book printed. When the books came back I would sell them to friends. I made the money back. The influential Bajan poet Frank Collymore critically supported Walcott's early work. After attending high school at Saint Mary's College , he received

9118-452: Was only his exchange with Harriet Monroe at Poetry , when she initially refused to print "At Melville's Tomb", that urged Crane to describe his "logic of metaphor" in print: If the poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and logic—what field of added consciousness and increased perceptions (the actual province of poetry, if not lullabies) can be expected when one has to relatively return to

9215-476: Was overjoyed at the views the location afforded him. The first known mention of The Bridge was in a 1923 letter to Gorham Munson in which he wrote: I am ruminating on a new longish poem under the title of The Bridge which carries on further the tendencies manifest in 'F and H.' It will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish it as I see it now, so much time will be wasted in thinking about it. Crane moved to Paterson, New Jersey , in 1927. In 1928, he worked as

9312-402: Was unfinished and published posthumously. Crane has been praised by several playwrights, poets, and literary critics, including Robert Lowell , Derek Walcott , Tennessee Williams , and Harold Bloom ; the latter called him "a High Romantic in the era of High Modernism". Allen Tate called Crane "one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give

9409-471: Was written to urge Eugene O'Neill's critical foreword to White Buildings , then passed around among friends, yet unpublished during Crane's life; and the famous "Letter to Harriet Monroe" (1926) was part of an exchange for the publication of "At Melville's Tomb" in Poetry . Crane's most quoted criticism is in the circulated, if long and unpublished, "General Aims and Theories": "As to technical considerations:

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