The Wreckage of Hart Crane

“One thing he has demonstrated—

the impossibility of getting anywhere

with the Whitmanian inspiration. No

writer of comparable ability has struggled

with it before, and, with Mr. Crane’s

wreckage in view, it seems highly unlikely

that any writer of comparable genius

will struggle with it again.”

—Yvor Winter, "The Progress of Hart Crane," Poetry 36 (June 1930), 153, 164-65.

The wreckage—or should I say the sinkage—of Miss Crane recently only confirms my astute criticism of literary genius in dishing both Miss Crane & Miss Whitman.

First the wreckage of The Bridge—now the sinkage of the Poet. Both incredibly tragic events—but both of them foretold by my foreboding predictions of doom.

It is now impossible for Miss Crane to recover herself. In any event, she has given us plenty of happy sailors and some good times when the word gets out that yes, indeed, “The Fleet’s in!!!”

As Miss Logan in The New York Times review of Miss Crane’s Collected Poems snidely remarked—Hart Crane was good at mooching sugar daddies and giving head to horny young sailorboys.

His last mooch-job, a Guggenheim down to Mexico to trick with the Cisco Kid and butchy Hispanic hustlers was simply a total disaster—just like the rest of his failed career as a Modernist Poet—a pansy Sapphic Modernist one at that.

Just as Djuna Barnes or Harry & Caresse Crosby who published the Black Sun version of The Bridge in Paris. Or Peggy Robson who typed and retyped the final texts of the poem Crane sent to Paris.

Just ask Walker Evans, the photographer, whose photos Crane used instead of Joseph Stella’s oil paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge. Stella’s heroic paintings were much too butch & macho—something like Evans was needed. Small photos to emphasize the gay intimacy & effeminate inwardness of Crane’s vision.

Perhaps I was too hetero, too full of what Gertrude Stein called “Patriarchal Poetry” expecting Crane to live up to my more male, heroic Pound Era aesthetics. Can I help it if I was offended by every queer line & homo section of The Bridge?

It is necessary, before attempting to dish Miss Crane’s demise, to place him in the proper genre and to give as accurate an account as one is able of his so-called theme.

1 The Bridge cannot be called a gay epic, in spite of its endeavor to create and embody a homosexual myth, because it has no narrative framework and so lacks the formal unity of a str8t epic.

2 It is not didactic, because there is no logical exposition with all its faggoty ideas; neither Homer nor Dante could possibly supply any true standard of comparison.

3 The structure we shall find is lyrical; but the poem is not a single lyric, but rather a collection of gay cabaret swan songs on themes more or less related and loosely dumped on each other.

4 The model, in so far as there is one, is obviously the God Gay Grey Poet Miss Whitman, whom the author proclaims in this book as his Master (Masturbator).

But now Miss Crane is dead—dead like Harry Crosby in the Hotel des Aristes in New York. A double suicide, an act of absurd violence without explanation, a grisly, sensational death that stunned everybody just as Crane’s absurd suicide from the railing of the Orizaba into the pale green shark-infested Caribbean shocked everybody.

I know I was simply shocked as well—but then it was bound to happen. What did Crane leave behind? Several lyrics that one might be tempted to call great, and in both books several charming minor lyrics and many scattered, magnificent fragments.

Let’s forget about his so-called pretensions at tres gay impossible Whitmanesque inspiration. No writer of comparable ability has struggled with it since, and, now with Miss Crane’s wreckage a la sinkage in shocking view, it seems highly unlikely that any writer of comparable genius will struggle with it again.

Miss Crane is not alone in this danger; it is one of the greatest dangers of the entire body of modern gay poetry—whether anti-intellectualist like Sapphic Modernism or its man-loving mongrel twin sister Queer Modernism.

It can be seen in the Poet Laureateship shit of Miss Anne Duffy—the eternal Grande Dame of British Poetry. The first & last & only female Poet Laureate that will ever grace the wonderful waves of butchy Britannia.

The exceedingly butchy laureates of the past such as the exquisitely devilish & nefarious wife-killer Ted Hughes surely will make a come-back with the next male dynasty.

Or the American Poet Laureate Kay Ryan—another fine example of what to expect from GLBT Poetics.

The dangers potential in the style of these first two Sapphic Modernist Poet Laureates has become actual and almost smothering so.

Recently, it can be seen in a good deal of the latest work of Alex Dimitrov, a 26-year-old rising poet, who wears a black leather jacket with matching black boots and jeans for his salon soirees. Sly and delicate, he is the founder of Wilde Boys, a roving salon for self-described queer poets at which attendees lounge fetchingly and flirtation comes in the guise of academic one-upmanship.

According to the Fashion and Style section of the snotty New York Times, this gaggle of young queens gather at dumpy, art-filled apartments on lower Fifth Avenue to do poetry. Stylishly swank, dirty and disheveled, slimly tailored, these fag pretenders cruise one another at the bar before settling into various parlors, which are tackily furnished with porno books, Midcentury Modern chairs and a large Negro painting by Miss Mapplethorpe.

Every seat is filled with slumming queens — a common sight at this makeshift Greenwich Village salon. No fewer than twelve fags crammed onto the same beige fainting couch, cocktails in hand. Handsome waiters squeezing through, young hustlers passing out in the bedrooms, platters of steak on toast, shrimp on skewers and salmon in cucumber cups.

It can be seen in a good deal of the latest work of Dennis Crosby, who, while revolutionizing the gay word, spends an appalling lot of detailed time chatting up gossipy email about bad boyz, suicide and the like.

I regret above all to add, that in the last three or four years’ work of Miss Dennis Cooper, her literary experiments in perpetual porno motion are becoming so repetitious as to appear very nearly mechanical or even static.

Miss Cooper, though a writer of great range and mastery, in all likelihood, more than any of these other notable nonentities, is like Hart Crane bound to be the victim of his own Sadomasochism—just as all intellectual writers like boyish Rimbaud whom he emulates eventually end up becoming.

Miss [Robert] Frost, on the other hand, at the age of one-hundred-fifty-years, seems to continue to grow amazingly. While most poets like Miss Dimitrov and Miss Cooper appear to be disintegrating fairly early, Miss Frost continues to crank it out unashamedly and unabashedly in his Amherst mansion…