Toni Morrison greets fellow Hall of Fame inductees Pete Hamill and E. L. Doctorow Ryan Brenizer Photography |
Hall of Fame inductees Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison Ryan Brenizer Photography |
Like many New York writers, Hart Crane was born somewhere else—in Garretsville, Ohio, in his case. He came here to live, quite alone, in 1916. He was 17, just a little older than the century, and he felt obscurely but intensely (Crane’s feelings were usually obscure and intense) that his fate and that of the century were deeply connected with each other and with the capital of modern life, New York City.
Langdon Hammer offers a tribute to Hart Crane
Ryan Brenizer Photography
On New Year’s Eve of that first year in the city, the new arrival wrote home from East 15th Street: “My Dear Father, I have just been out for a long ride up Fifth Ave. on an omnibus. It is very cold and clear, and the marble facades of the marvelous mansions shone like crystal in the sun. . . . The room I have now is a bit too small, so after my week is up, I shall seek out another place near here, for I like the neighborhood. The houses are so different here, that it seems most interesting, for a while at least, to live in one.”
Crane was peripatetic and lived in many houses in the city. The address that mattered most was 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn. It was there he began the love affair of his life with a Danish sailor named Emil Opffer, and where, “living in the shadow of the bridge,” as he put it, he conceived of his epic poem about the visionary promise of America, The Bridge. “That window,” he said about his window facing Brooklyn Bridge, “is where I would be most remembered of all: the ships, the harbor, and the skyline of Manhattan, midnight, morning or evening,—rain, snow or sun, it is everything from the mountains to the walls of Jerusalem and Nineveh, and all related and in actual contact with the changelessness of the many waters that surround it.”
The Bridge begins with an ecstatic address to Brooklyn Bridge in which its Gothic arches suggest a new religion and a new image of divinity. The bridge rises up above not simply New York but the whole of the continent, even the Midwest Crane left behind to make his life here. This stanza comes from the proem:
O Sleepless as the river under thee,That’s gorgeous poetry, as stirring as any language an American has authored. But it isn’t easy poetry, and The Bridge was a puzzle and a problem when it arrived in most reviewers’ mailboxes. Crane died, a suicide, in 1932. He knew what he had achieved in his poetry. But he must have feared no one would ever recognize it, including the most important audience he wrote for, literary New York. I can just imagine, therefore, how gratified he would be by this recognition tonight. Hart Crane wrote the great poem of New York, and it is right to name him one of New York’s greats.
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
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