What laughing chains the water wove and threw!
	I learned to catch the trout's moon whisper; I
	Drifted how many hours I never knew,
	But, watching, saw that fleet young crescent die,---

	And one star, swinging, take its place, alone,
	Cupped in the larches of the mountain pass ---
	Until, immortally, it bled into the dawn.
	I left my sleek boat nibbling margin grass. . .	

	[(from "The Dance") The Bridge]
	Copyright (c) 1970 Liveright Publishing Corporation

Biographical Notes

• Born July 21, 1899, Ohio
• Died Apr. 27, 1932 (suicidal jump from a steamer home from Mexico, where he had been on a Guggenheim Fellowship)
• 2 volumes of poetry published in his lifetime: White Buildings (1926), and The Bridge (1930), winning the annual Poetry award in 1930
• Influenced by: Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound (surprise?)

Bibliography

• Bennett, M.F., Unfractioned Idiom: Hart Crane and Modernism (1987)
• Brunner, E.J., Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge (1985)
• Butterfield, R. W., The Broken Arc: A Study of Hart Crane (1969)
• Crane, Hart, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. by Brom Weber (1966)
• Crane, Hart, The Bridge, commentaries by Waldo Frank and Thomas A. Vogler (NY: Liveright, 1970)
• Dickie, Margaret, On the Modernist Long Poem (Iowa: U of Iowa Press, 1986) ch. 3
• Edelman, Lee, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane's Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987)
• Giles, Paul, Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986)
• Koga, Tetsuo, "Can History Defeat Our Human Passion? --An Essay on Hart Crane's 'Voyages' (I, II)" Jinbun Kenkyu (Faculty of Letters, Osaka City U) (1994, '95)
• Unterecker, John, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (1969; repr. 1987)
• Uroff, M. D., Hart Crane: The Patterns of His Poetry (1974)

• Samuel Greenberg: American Poet
  Biography, Greenberg's prose "Between Historical Life," bibliography, e-text of 26 poems, facsimiles of 2 poems (handwritten manuscript versions), info on New York city with 3 maps of the areas where he lived, info on Hart Crane who was greatly influenced by Greenberg's poems. According to Mr. Michael L. Smith, who maintains the site, "Crane's poem "Emblems of Conduct" is actually a mosaic of slightly-altered lines taken from six of Greenberg's poems."

Note: This page is for reference purpose only. As I can't afford to update it, I no longer list it in the index page.

20th-century Poetry Index Page
Quid prodest hoc ad aeternitatem
Professor Eiichi Hishikawa
Faculty of Letters, Kobe University