Hart Crane in the context of "Paterson (poem)"

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⭐ Core Definition: Hart Crane

Harold Hart Crane (21 July 1899 – 27 April 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. On April 27, 1932, Crane, in an inebriated state, jumped off the steamship USS Orizaba and into the Atlantic Ocean while the ship was en route from Vera Cruz to New York via Havana, Cuba. He left no suicide note, but witnesses to his jump believed he was intentionally killing himself. Throughout his life, he had multiple homosexual relations, many of which were described in, or otherwise influenced, his poetry. He had one known female partner, Peggy Cowley, around a year before his death.

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👉 Hart Crane in the context of Paterson (poem)

Paterson is an epic poem by American poet William Carlos Williams published, in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958. The origin of the poem was an eighty-five line long poem written in 1926, after Williams had read and been influenced by James Joyce's novel Ulysses. As he continued writing lyric poetry, Williams spent increasing amounts of time on Paterson, honing his approach to it both in terms of style and structure. While The Cantos of Ezra Pound and The Bridge by Hart Crane could be considered partial models, Williams was intent on a documentary method that differed from both these works, one that would mirror "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city."

While Williams might or might not have said so himself, commentators such as Christoper Beach and Margaret Lloyd have called Paterson his response to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Pound's Cantos. The long gestation time of Paterson before its first book was published was due in large part to Williams's honing of prosody outside of conventional meter and his development of an overall structure that would stand on a par with Eliot and Pound yet remain endemically American, free from past influences and older forms.

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Hart Crane in the context of Boni & Liveright

Boni & Liveright (pronounced "BONE-eye" and "LIV-right") is an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Liveright, Inc., in 1928 and then Liveright, Inc., in 1931, published over a thousand books. Before its bankruptcy in 1933 and subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., it had achieved considerable notoriety for editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws. Their logo is of a cowled monk.

It was the first American publisher of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, E. E. Cummings, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Anita Loos, and the Modern Library series. In addition to being the house of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson throughout the 1920s, it notably published T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Isadora Duncan's My Life, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, Ezra Pound's Personae, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Eugene O'Neill's plays. In his biography of Horace Liveright, Firebrand, author Tom Dardis noted B&L was "the most magnificent yet messy publishing firm this century has seen." In 1974 Liveright's remaining backlist was bought by W. W. Norton & Company. Norton revived the name as an imprint in 2012 as Liveright Publishing Corporation.

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Hart Crane in the context of Caresse Crosby

Caresse Crosby (born Mary Phelps Jacob; April 20, 1892 – January 24, 1970) was an American publisher and writer. Time called her the "literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris." As an American patron of the arts, she and her second husband, Harry Crosby, founded the Black Sun Press, which was instrumental in publishing some of the early works of many authors who would later become famous, among them Anaïs Nin, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Hart Crane, and Robert Duncan. She was also the recipient of a patent for the first successful modern bra.

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