Harry Crosby And Hart Crane Essay, Research Paper

Sy Kahn

On Crosby and Crane

Crosby’s own books of poetry and his diaries, Shadows

of the Sun, testify that he apprehended and rendered reality in much the same way as

Crane. For example, both shared an enthusiasm for the technology of the century and saw in

the symbol of the machine a dynamic expression of man’s restlessness and creative

spirit. Crosby’s interest is reflected in the many photographs he took of machine

subjects: airplanes, dynamos, factory smoke stacks, railroad signal towers, and wires

strung against the sky like giant harps. He was especially entranced with speed, drove

fast cars, loved race horses and whippets, kept both, and learned to fly and solo only a

few months before his death. The pace and space of Crane’s poem, the many metaphors

of movement, and, above all, the metaphoric implications of the bridge symbol were

precisely the devices that would touch Crosby in the most direct and responsive ways. As

their mutual enthusiasm for Blake and Whitman suggests, Crane and Crosby were poets who

responded to an ideal image of man, and their resource to the metaphors of the machine, of

speed and space, were for the purpose of suggesting man’s inventive and adventurous

nature. As with Whitman, their celebration of man’s technological accomplishments was

not for man’s literal achievement but rather symbolic of his insistent attempt to

relate himself to an ultimate reality and destiny that suited the dimensions of his soul.

From Sy Kahn, "Hart Crane and Harry Crosby," Journal of Modern Literature

1:1 (1970), 47.