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CLEVELAND/AKRON'S

One of the most respected critics and historians of American letters, R.W.B. Lewis, begins his 1967 study of Hart Crane's poetry by stating blankly that "Hart Crane is one of the finest modern poets in our language, and one of the dozenodd major poets in American history. Despite this kind of reputation. Crane, a gay poet native to northeast Ohio, is largely ignored by gays in this

area,

took my secondary and undergraduate schooling in Cleveland, often walking streets that Crane had walked, without ever hearing his name mentioned. On July 21, 1974, the Blossom Festival School marked what would have been the poet's seventy-fifth birthday with a choral concert and poetry reading in Kent. According to a report in the Plain Dealer the following day, about fifty people attended the event. Crane is not noticeably honored in Garrettsville, where he was born in 1899; in Cleveland, where he lived from 1908 until 1917 and again from 1920 until 1923; nor in Akron, where he worked and loved for a few months at the end of 1919.

By April 27, 1932, the date on which he jumped to his death in the Caribbean from the deck of the

Orizaba, Crane had published White Buildings, a collection of lyrics and The Bridge, his epic vision of America and had ready for publication a third collection, Key West: An Island Sheaf.

This neglect of an important literary figure in his own home area should concern Cleveland area gays because Crane can serve as a deserving hero among us. That Crane was a homosexual is not of major importance in his work, but it is an undeniable fact of his life.

Sut What's New at

HIGH GEAR

HART CRANE

John Unterecker, author of Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane, the monumental biography published in 1969, places Crane's first homosexual experience sometime between his twelfth and sixteenth years. Frequent "experiences," often confessed to straight friends in defiance when Crane had been drinking too heavily, can be documented throughout his life.

Crane, however, had at least two relationships that brought him the satisfaction of love. On December 13, 1919, he wrote from Akron to his friend Gorham Munson that he had "embarked on a love affair, (of all places, unexpected, here in Akron!)..." Two weeks later he confided more to Munson: "This 'affair' that I have been having has been the most intense and satisfactory one of my whole life, and I am all broken up at the thought of leaving him. Yes, the last word will jolt you. I have never had devotion returned before like this, nor ever found a soul, mind and body so worthy of devotion. Probably I never shall agian." When Crane left Akron to work in his father's thriving candy business (the elder Crane invented the Lifesaver) in Cleveland, he continued to see this lover on some weekends but not SO frequently as he Because the man's identity has not been established, it is not possible to date the end of the affair.

wished,

Crane did find love again. In 1923, he met Emil Opffer, a merchant mariner, with whom he developed a relationship modeled on Whitman's ideal of manly love. Crane described it as a relationship dependent less on sex than on "a purity of joy." Opffer's work led to frequent separations that made their time together all the more joyful, and

sometimes riotous for Crane. His relationship with Opffer did result in one of his major lyric efforts, "Voyages," a cycle of six poems that Lewis calls "perhaps the most beautiful love poetry in. modern American literature."

Passages from the first two of the cycles demonstrate both the beauty and difficulty of Crane's poetry. The first poem concludes:

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O brilliant kids, frisk with your

dog,

Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached

By time and the elements; but there is a line

You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it

Spry cordage of your bodies to

caresses

Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

JULY 1976

The second poem follows with

a contrasting idea:

And yet this great wink of eternity

Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,

Samite

sheeted

processioned where

Her undinal

and,'

vast belly"

moonward bends,

Laughing the wrapt inflections

of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells

On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,

The sceptered terror of whose session rends,

As her demeanors motion well or ill,

All but the pieties of lovers' hands.

The density and difficulty of Crane's poetry perhaps explains his failure to gain wide acceptance as the follower of Whitman that he, in part, conceived himself to be. The difficult language is purposeful, however. Crane explained to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, in 1926: "as a poet I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the conciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem."

No matter how difficult to apprehend logically, Crane's language offers a strong sensual satisfaction for the reader in the sound of the lines in the ear and the feel of the words on the tongue. A passage that illustrates these qualities particularly well is the apostrophe to Brooklyn Bridge in the concluding "Atlantis' section of The Bridge:

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