HART CRANE – American poet, born (d: 1932). Crane’s father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business by inventing the Life Saver (an odd foreshadowing of the poet’s death, ironically). Crane was Gay and associated his sexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as a outsider in relation to society. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work. It is one of the classic Gay Archetypes.
Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. White Buildings contains many of Crane’s best lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and a powerful sequence of erotic poems called "Voyages," written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant marine.
Faustus and Helen was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet the modern world 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 was "so damned dead," an impasse, and 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." He meant an epic poem.
This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.
Just before noon on April 27, 1932, on a steamship passage back to New York from Mexico — right after he was reportedly beaten for making sexual advances to a male crew member — he committed suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed Crane's intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard. His body was never recovered.
A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA" ("Voyager," John Unterecker, 1969). Crane's suicide inspired several works of art by noted artist Jasper Johns, including "Periscope" and "Diver." Hart Crane: Complete Poems & Selected Letters (Langdon Hammer, ed.)
Repose Of Rivers
By Hart Crane
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.
Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
Where cypresses shared the noon’s
Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
Asunder ...
How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled—
I remember now its singing willow rim.
And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
After the city that I finally passed
With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
The monsoon cut across the delta
At gulf gates ... There, beyond the dykes
I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
And willows could not hold more steady sound.
ORPHEUS: traditional date of birth. Orpheus was the son of Calliope and either Oeagrus or Apollo. He was the greatest musician and poet of Greek myth, whose songs could charm wild beasts and coax even rocks and trees into movement. He was one of the Argonauts, and when the Argo had to pass the island of the Sirens, it was Orpheus' distractions that prevented the crew from being lured to destruction. This much of the legend of Orpheus is fairly certain. It's the final days of Orpheus, however, that are the subject of varying stories.
One such version justified Orpheus' inclusion here. The celebrated Thracian musician became a follower of Dionysius and, it is believed, soothed the Argonauts with means other than mere melodies, thus introducing homophile love into Greece. As a result, Orpheus was soundly hated by Aphrodite who considered him a competitor and rival. Orpheus met his end at the hands of the women of Thrace who, because the handsome hunk refused to pay them any attention, tore him to pieces.
And…speaking of charming Thracians…
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The great Cuban poet, novelist and memoirist REINALDO ARENAS was born (d. 1990). Despite his early sympathy for the 1959 revolution, Arenas grew critical of and then rebelled against the Cuban government. Born in the countryside outside of Holguin, Cuba, in 1973 he was imprisoned for his homosexuality and his opposition against the Fidel Castro regime. In 1980 he went to the USA. In 2000 Julian Schnabel made a movie about his life based on Arenas' memoir: Before Night Falls.
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