Chapter 3: Hart Crane

The Poet in the Ivory Tower

Hart Crane
1899-1932

The "U.S.S. Orizaba" picked up steam as its barreled along its usual Mexico-Cuba-New York route, when the clock struck high noon on that tropical April day in 1932. On each of the ship’s decks, passengers marveled at the blazing sun, just minutes after the 443-foot liner left the Havana dock and set sail on the Gulf of Mexico. To painter Margarite “Peggy” Baird, the trip back to New York signaled a new beginning; she was returning to the Big Apple a soon-to-be-divorced woman from her second husband, literary critic Malcolm Cowley.

As she sat in her stateroom, a horrific scene was playing out on the top deck. A fellow artist had walked to the railing, neatly folded his topcoat over it and raised himself on his toes. He dropped back for a couple seconds and shouted, “Goodbye, everybody!” before he vaulted himself over the rail into the warm waters below. Some passengers said he frantically flailed his arms in a desperate motion for help; others simply chalked up the hand-waving as his way of bidding a final farewell. Cries of “Man overboard!” pierced the air. But the crew’s search of the gulf in several lifeboats was fruitless. The poet had sunk to his watery grave. “He had rapped on my stateroom door before he jumped from the deck and said that he wanted to say goodbye,” Baird told the Associated Press once the ship docked in New York Harbor several days later. “Of course, I didn’t dream what he meant.”

If she had only known the truth. The spur-of-the-moment suicide leap marked the end of Hart Crane, a Lost Generation writer whose tormented life was riddled with financial woes, long stretches of writer’s block and a homosexual existence in a largely homophobic, 20th-century society. But whether or not he realized it, critics already had hailed his poems as some of the most influential literary contributions of the Jazz Age. And it all started in Northeast Ohio.

An only child, Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in the small Portage County town of Garrettsville about 45 miles southeast of Cleveland. His grandfather, Arthur, and father, Clarence Arthur (“C.A.”), ran a flourishing maple-sugar cannery in town. His mother, the former Grace Edna Hart, was a beautiful, cultured yet neurotic Christian Science practitioner. To outsiders, the Crane clan that lived on Freedom Street came from the best stock the village could offer.

The Crane men expanded their company to Warren in neighboring Trumbull County in 1903. Business exploded and C.A. decided to sell the plant to a Chicago refinery. The profit he made on the deal helped finance his new venture: the Crane Chocolate Company.

Meanwhile, friction between the incurably frisky C.A. and the prim and proper Grace grew so intense that they shuttled young Harold to Cleveland’s East Side in 1908 to live with his maternal grandparents, Clinton and Elizabeth Belden Hart. The separation would spare him the constant bickering between his parents, they reasoned. In a three-story house at 1709 E. 115th St., Harold spent most of his time in “the ivory tower” on the top floor, where, at 14 years old, he started to jot down pieces of poetry as his Victrola blared recordings of Ravel, Debussy, Strauss and Wagner compositions.

Harold’s East High School classmates were well aware of his passion for the written word, even more so when "Bruno’s Weekly" published his Oscar Wilde tribute, “C33,” in September of 1916. This first taste of literary recognition convinced him to drop out of school a year before graduation and move to New York City to pursue a career as a writer the following December at about the same time his parents’ divorce became final. The social and sexual liberties he discovered in the big city amazed his Northeast Ohio sensibilities. “New York is a series of exposures intense and rather savage, which never would be quite as available in Cleveland,” Harold wrote to his dad in his first letter away from home.

Once he was in New York, he rented an apartment on Gramercy Park, where he acquainted himself with seasoned writers and poets like Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank and Allen Tate. He also befriended fellow Cleveland natives, including painter Carl Schmitt and publisher Harrison “Hal” Smith. At the end of March of 1917, his poem, “The Hive,” appeared in "Pagan." This latest publication of his work prompted an excited Harold to write to his dad to pick up a copy of the magazine at Laukuff’s, a recently opened bookstore run by German immigrant Richard Laukuff at 40 Taylor Arcade in downtown Cleveland. His mother also insisted that he adopt his middle name, Hart, as his byline to give her side of the family part of the recognition for his success. A lack of steady income, however, forced him to board a train and head back to his grandparents’ home in June of 1918.

The homecoming proved a disaster. Hart couldn’t keep a job, lasting three weeks as a riveter in a munitions plant on the Lake Erie waterfront. He tried his hand at newspaper reporting, only to quit his $20-a-week, police-beat assignment at the Plain Dealer after two months. He also rushed downtown to the Army’s recruitment office to volunteer for overseas duty, but the military turned him down.

The string of rejections and setbacks led to frequent drinking binges that the 19-year-old Hart couldn’t handle well. In his half-crocked stupors, he explored his sexuality by trolling sleazy saloons in Little Italy to try and pick up men. His unwanted advances naturally sparked violent brawls that left him bruised, battered and sitting in a jail cell. He also broke down in an alcohol-fueled letter and confessed to his mother that he was gay. He pleaded with her to never tell his father.

By February of 1919, Hart successfully persuaded his dad to give him regular $25-a-week allowances so he could return to New York. He first moved into a three-room, $3.50-a-week basement rental on West 70th Street with three roommates, including Alexander Baltzly, who was a Harvard alumnus, Army lieutenant and champion tennis player. He then lived alone in a $10-a-month, two-room flat on West 16th Street above the offices of the "Little Review" magazine, for which he took the unpaid position of advertising manager. He also volunteered for editor Joseph Kling at "Pagan." But his father’s allowances suddenly stopped and, once again, Hart’s bank account dried up. For the second time in two years, he had no choice but to return to Northeast Ohio in November of 1919.

Good thing, too. By this time, C.A. had expanded his candy company by building a factory at 208 St. Clair Ave. in downtown Cleveland, where the Cuyahoga County Justice Center is located today. He had opened a small tearoom on Playhouse Square and rented retail space in Akron, where Hart worked as a soda jerk and sold boxes of Crane Chocolates from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day during the holiday season. The size of the family business made him think of dollar signs. “Things are whizzing, and I don’t know how many millions (my father) will be worth before he gets through growing,” he wrote in a letter to Gorham Munson, a Pagan writer whom he had met through Kling in Greenwich Village earlier that year. “If I work hard enough, I suppose I am due to a goodly share of it, and as I told you, it seems to me the wisest thing to do now is to join him.”

His father’s business acumen in 1919 had sharply improved from that of eight years earlier, when he arguably made the stupidest move of his candy-making career. In 1911, while still in Warren, C.A. tinkered with a recipe for “Crane’s Peppermint Life Savers” to boost his profit margin during the usually slow summer season for candy sales. He chose the treat’s name because each of the hard, round sweets looked like a miniature life preserver. But because he shipped packages in cardboard tubes that absorbed the candies’ minty flavor, the product was virtually tasteless by the time his distributors received it. Besides, nobody wanted to pay a nickel for a package of mints “with a middle made of thin air.” Production proved costly, forcing him to sell the recipe and its trademark to a two-man advertising firm in New York for a measly $2,900. The partners re-packaged the candy in foil to retain the taste and, by 1930, their company was raking in a quarter-million dollars a year in Life Savers sales.

Business blunder aside, C.A.’s company was thriving by the end of 1919. So was Hart’s personal life. He had been transferred to Cleveland after the holidays to manage a basement warehouse in his dad’s factory. And after writing a glowing review of Sherwood Anderson’s short-story collection, "Winesburg, Ohio," he was regularly corresponding with the Elyria-born author. He also frequented Laukuff’s bookstore, where he met other artists like Swiss-born painter William Lescaze, Cleveland Play House set designer Richard Rychtarik and Cleveland Institute of Music student Jean Binet, who was studying under Cleveland Orchestra conductor Ernest Bloch.

And in more letters to Munson, Hart described a “love affair” with an unnamed paramour from Akron, although he failed to reveal to his friend that the relationship involved another man. “Whatever might happen, I am sure of a wonderful pool of memories,” he pounded out on his Corona typewriter. “Perhaps, this is the romance of my life. It is wonderful to find the realization of one’s dreams in flesh, form, laughter and intelligence -- all in one person.”

But in a December 27 confessional, Hart revealed his secret, trumpeting it as “the most intense and satisfactory one of my whole life,” he wrote. “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 such a soul, mind and body so worthy of devotion. Probably I shall never again.”

The distance between his work in Cleveland and his boyfriend in Akron led to the romance’s fizzle by the spring of 1920. That autumn, Hart had been assigned to temporarily manage his dad’s new store in Washington, D.C., where he found the nation’s capital “all rather dead,” even though he managed to hook up for one-night stands with a small stream of soldiers and sailors on leave. He found the anonymous encounters disgusting and cheap. After his return to Cleveland, he resigned from the family business on April 19, 1921, claiming his position was “a terrible, old grind.”

Hart floated from one odd job to the next. For a $2.50-a-day wage, he distributed sales fliers door to door. He lasted one day. He then landed a gig as a copywriter for the Corday & Gross Company at 1771 E. 24th St. After work, he partied with his circle of artist friends and played host to out-of-town visitors like Anderson and Munson. He also continued to trick with total strangers. “I have been driven at last to the parks,” he wrote on the Fourth of July in 1922 to Wilbur Underwood, a gay poet and government worker he met in Washington. “The first night brought me a most strenuous wooing and the largest instrument I have handled. As this happened only two nights ago, I am modest and satisfied. Still, I am uneasy. I fear for all the anti-climaxes that are surely now in store for me.”

Five months later, he was sharing one of his ultimate fantasies: To have sex with a black man. He even called his imaginary lover “L’Afrique.” “My anticipations were so strong and my desire to give you a shock was so gleeful that I announced it as a fait accompli, when, in reality, it was only dependent on the promise of another person to arrange such an assignation,” he wrote in another letter to Underwood on December 10. “I am sorry to relate that it never came to pass. I am still limited to the experiences of a single race. The dark and warm embrace is yet to come!”

Fearing that his job at Corday & Gross provided no room for a promotion, Hart sought work in the winter of 1923 from Stanley Patmo, who had started a direct-mail advertising firm that would become the Roger Williams Company at 3804 Payne Ave. He was hired to bang out ad copy for clients like Pittsburgh Water Heaters, Pittsburgh Plate Glass and the Akron-based Seiberling Tires. He was dependable and cheerful in the office, never letting his late-night drinking bouts get in the way of his work in the morning.

At home in his grandparents’ ivory tower, Hart obsessed over what would become one of his first important poems of his literary career. The three-part “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” was his answer to T.S. Eliot’s perceived cultural pessimism in the 434-line poem, “The Waste Land.” Hart described his piece as “a bit of Dionysian splendor” with rhythmic jazz meters and interwoven symbolism that painted the “basic emotional attitude toward beauty that the Greeks had.” It took more than a year for a magazine to agree to publish the poem in its entirety.

Hart contemplated his next “new enterprise,” one that would consume the next seven years of his life. The modernist epic, "The Bridge," would result in a collection of 15 poems that traced the history of American civilization, from Christopher Columbus’ discovery of it in 1492 to the Civil War to modern advancements such as its subway system. And the Brooklyn Bridge, a New York landmark that Hart admired, would serve as the piece’s focal point. The project also would be his first and, ultimately, only attempt at long-form poetry. In its preliminary stages, the piece captured “the mystical synthesis of America,” he wrote in a February 18 letter to Munson.

But Hart faced yet another professional obstacle: Patno’s ad agency had to let him go in March of 1924 because the company had no assignments to give him. For fear that C.A. would think of his son as a failure, Hart persuaded the company to concoct a scheme that would take him to New York on a month-long “business trip,” when, in fact, he would look for another job. When he found work, he could return to Cleveland and feign resigning his position.

The plan worked. After a series of a half-dozen interviews with its executives, Hart was hired by the J. Walter Thompson Agency in late May to work in the firm’s statistical department for a $35 weekly salary, a substantial pay cut from the $50 a week he was earning at Patno’s place. But he was at the point of accepting any kind of employment; he was literally down to his last handful of pennies as he temporarily stayed with Munson and his wife, Lisa, in their apartment.

Once he was back on his feet, Hart settled into a room on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. After work, from five at night to two in the morning, he worked on The Bridge to capture the “feelings of elation…that one experiences in walking across my beloved Brooklyn Bridge,” Hart said. Above all else, he insisted that no magazine could ever publish this series of poems in bits and pieces as a few publications tried to do with “Faustus and Helen.” But because of his drive to write poetry full-time, the drudgery of daily office work dragged him down. He abruptly quit his Thompson position in October. He’d never have financial stability again as he sponged off friends for money, food and a roof over his head to concentrate on his art.

Enter Emil Opffer. In the spring of 1924, Hart met the Danish-born merchant marine through their mutual friend, Sue Jenkins. At her house, the career sailor regaled his audience with tales of every port of call he visited. Hart fell in love with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Emil, who was three years his senior. The couple was soon living together in Emil’s father’s house on Columbia Heights in, ironically, the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge. Because Emil was often at sea, they were apart more than they were together. And Hart documented his feelings of separation in a series of six love poems appropriately titled Voyages.

His catalog of original poems continued to grow and, by the spring of 1925, Hart decided the time had come to self-publish his first book of pieces, including the Voyages series and “Faustus and Helen.” Greenwich Village publisher Samuel Jacobs even offered to donate his expertise to typeset a run of the book’s first 500 copies when he wasn’t working on other projects. "White Buildings," whose titled was inspired by the artwork of Greek surrealist painter Giorgio di Chirico, hit bookstands later in the year.

To keep himself further occupied, Hart continued to work on "The Bridge," but he needed money to support himself. On a whim, he fired off a letter on December 3, 1925, to ask respected arts financier Otto Hermann Kahn to financially back his epic. Three days later, the two men met in Kahn’s apartment, where Hart stated his case. It was impossible to write such a complex piece in a reasonable amount of time if one had to spend half his day in a menial office job, he argued. While he was timid about asking for help, he was convinced that "The Bridge" would “enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America.” Kahn bought the sales pitch and agreed to loan the poet $2,000 to be paid in four installments, the first of which he immediately issued. Hart couldn’t believe his good fortune. Somebody was actually going to pay him to write nothing but poetry, he told a few friends.

With the first loan payment, Hart planned to buy a ticket to sail to his maternal grandmother’s winter retreat, Villa Casas, on the Isle of Pines directly south of Havana. Discovered by Columbus on his third trip to the New World in 1494, the island had inspired scenes in both Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Treasure Island" and James Matthew Barrie’s "Peter Pan." Its sandy beaches, tropical fruit orchards and legendary tales of pirate invasions could add to the romanticism of writing The Bridge, Hart reasoned.

The arrangement didn’t quite work out as he imagined. The house was virtually uninhabitable. The roof leaked, its gardens were overgrown, and mosquitoes swarmed everywhere. But it provided the privacy that Hart required to write freelance book reviews and shorter poems to supplement Kahn’s generous loans while he toiled on his epic. And there was Mrs. Simpson, the house’s caretaker, to keep him company.

Still, Hart’s frequent jaunts to the mainland to smoke Cuban cigars and pound back bottles of native beer nearly exhausted the next two loan installments. Another pleasure trip to the nearby Cayman Islands and an emergency doctor’s appointment in Havana for an ear infection added to his financial misery. He wrote to Kahn in August to ask for the last $500 of the loan. Unfortunately, his benefactor was traveling and didn’t receive the letter until two months later.

Hart had no choice but to stay put at Villa Casas to immerse himself in "The Bridge." Poems like “The Mango Tree,” “Cutty Sark” and “Ave Maria” emerged from the marathon writing session. Then, as anticipated in the Caribbean in the middle of October of 1926, a hurricane slammed into the island. And Hart loved every minute of it.

As ferocious winds whipped through the house, he huddled under his bed with Mrs. Simpson and her chatty pet parakeet, Attaboy. In the morning, they celebrated their survival by dancing to Spanish music from Hart’s record collection. But they decided that there was no sense in staying on the island since it would take months to repair the storm-battered house. So Hart returned to New York with a suitcase of clothes and drafts of his poems. He also collected the last installment of the loan that Kahn promised.

Hart moved back in with Emil’s father (and Emil, whenever he was home on leave). He also presented the drafts to Kahn, who was pleased with what he read and offered to loan yet another $300 for Hart to continue the project, this time on the Caribbean island of Martinique. C.A. also sent a $100 check “in order that you have plenty of cash to start off with,” he wrote in an accompanying letter.

But the trip never materialized. A mentally irrational Grace -- who was living in Hollywood with her widowed mother -- claimed she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If she did go crazy and he went back to the Caribbean, she groaned that his grandmother would have no one to take care of her. An angry Hart canceled his steamer ticket and immediately left for California to move into a cottage that his mother was renting. But Southern California offered him no motivation to work on The Bridge, with such distractions as the roar of the surf and the glamour of movie stars.

Emil, who was sailing on the "U.S.S. California," also arrived one evening in March of 1927 on a few hours’ leave. The pair ended up in a speakeasy in San Pedro, where five thugs robbed them of their belongings and practically left Emil for dead. He recovered on the ship as it sailed to its next stop in San Francisco. “He always seems to get the hardest end of things,” Hart wrote to his friends, Bill and Sue Brown, in New York.

On April 3, exactly six months to the day when he announced he was going to California, Hart walked into a travel agency and booked a one-way train ticket to New York. He couldn’t wait another minute to get out of town and finish "The Bridge." The five-day trip drummed up much-needed inspiration, especially when the train lumbered into New Orleans. There, Hart could see the mouth of the Mississippi, about which he had written in “The River” section of the piece. “There is something tragically beautiful about the scene, the great, magnificent Father of Waters pouring itself at last into the oblivion of the Gulf,” he wrote to his father, who had opened a restaurant and inn, Crane’s Canary Cottage, at the corner of West and West Orange streets in Chagrin Falls.

Hart gave himself a July deadline to wrap up "The Bridge" upon his New York return. But the guilt he felt at leaving his mentally ill mother only sparked another bout of writer’s block. The imposed target date came and went. Before he knew it, 1927 turned into 1928. He still had not finished the project.

In September, his beloved Grandmother Hart died. While he waited for word on any kind of inheritance from her estate, Hart’s drinking escalated. Stories circulated that, when he was smashed, he accused anybody within earshot of cheating him out of money, success and fame. Then came the final blow: He learned in November that Grace -- who was the executrix of her mother’s will -- refused to sign the papers to release Hart’s $5,000 inheritance unless he rejoined her in California. He never spoke to her again.

Another of his closest relationships came to a screeching halt in 1929. Home on leave, Emil caught Hart in bed with another man in the Columbia Heights apartment. A “stupid betrayal,” the sailor lamented. After five years, the lovers parted ways romantically, but they remained friends for the rest of Hart’s life.

The beginning of 1930 brought a happier note. After seven years, Hart finally finished "The Bridge," and publisher Horace Liveright was going to order a 250-book run of its first printing. But with the country in a newfound economic depression, Hart worried that nobody would buy a copy. He was equally anxious how literary critics would review it.

The book drew mixed reaction. An early critique by Herbert Weinstock compared Hart’s style to that of Walt Whitman. "The Nation" reviewer Granville Hicks wrote that the poems’ imagery was “sound and amazingly original.” "New Republic" critic Malcolm Cowley -- one of Hart’s first acquaintances in New York -- considered “The River” as “one of the most important poems of our age.”

Yet there was also a chorus of disapproval. In "The Bookman," writer Odell Shepard bemoaned that the poems “proceed with frenzy in the wrong direction.” "Hound and Horn" reviewer Allen Tate trashed the book for its lack of a coherent plot. And thanks to critic Percy Hutchinson, the revered "New York Times Book Review" panned "The Bridge" for its “lack of intelligibility.”

Despite the jolting feedback, Hart decided to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship and an accompanying $2,500 grant to study and write abroad. He mailed his application on August 27 and prepared to wait until the following spring, when the foundation would announce its decision. Hart then packed his suitcase and moved to Chagrin Falls to stay with C.A. and his new wife, the former Bessie Meacham. He helped out in his dad’s candy factory during the holidays. He also made daylong trips to Garrettsville and Warren to visit aunts, uncles and cousins he hadn’t seen in years.

The Guggenheim news came on March 15, 1931. Of 712 applicants, Hart and 76 other scholars, writers, artists, musicians and scientists had scored one-year grants to create and research in other parts of the world without financial worry. One catch: Because Hart wasn’t married, his grant could not exceed $2,000. It didn’t matter; his money woes were seemingly over so he could study in France.

But at the last minute, he changed his mind about his ultimate destination. Instead of Europe, where most fellows chose to study, Hart asked to live south of the border. There, he could write an epic poem about Montezuma’s conquest of the Mexican people. His supervisor, Henry Allen Moe, approved, and Hart boarded the "Orizaba" steamer in early April with his stipend: $300 in cash in his wallet and a certified letter showing a $1,700 line of credit.

The liner embarked from New York for the southward four-day sail on the Atlantic to its midway stop in Havana. The second leg took Hart west to the port of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. The last part of the journey included a 264-mile train ride over mountain ranges to the Mexico City suburb of Mixcoac, where he rented an eight-room Spanish villa, complete with his own manservant.

Between Cuba and Mexico, Hart developed a new passion: tequila. For weeks, he drank a lot and wrote very little. His drunken tears through town resulted in frequently obnoxious brawls and jail stints. He even disrupted a formal tea party at the American Embassy in Mexico City, which prompted a string of anonymous complaints that were wired to Guggenheim headquarters. Moe had no choice but to issue a letter in which he scolded the rowdy poet for making the foundation look bad and ordered him to “get down to work.”

On July 6, Hart received an unexpected cable from his stepmother, Bessie, who let him know that C.A.’s health was quickly failing. A follow-up telegram later in the day confirmed that his 56-year-old father had died of a stroke. Hart immediately booked an airplane flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then a train ticket on the Santa Fe Railroad’s Grand Canyon Limited back to Chagrin Falls.

Hart stayed in Northeast Ohio for six weeks after his dad’s funeral and burial on July 12 in Garrettsville. He also learned that he would inherit $1,000 from C.A.’s estate and collect as much as $2,000 annually from the profits of his father’s candy factory, retail stores and Crane’s Canary Cottage. The latter part of the inheritance was a long shot since, in the depths of the Great Depression, most of the ventures were losing money. In fact, his father was nearly bankrupt when he died.

Hart returned to Mexico at the end of August to find that Peggy Baird Cowley had arrived to initiate amicable divorce proceedings against her husband. Twelve years Hart’s senior, she also knew the poet well. The pair bonded. And for the first time in his life, he fell in love and had sex with a woman. At a New Year’s Eve party that Peggy was throwing in the town of Taxco north of Acapulco, the couple officially declared their love and faith for each other.

The affair fueled a much-needed burst of poetic creativity. On January 27, 1932, Hart started work on “The Broken Tower,” a piece that scholars have determined is both an affirmation of his introduction to a straight life and a denial of his past gay relationships. But it had nothing to do with Montezuma, Mexico or anything thing else he promised to write for the Guggenheim folks. His never-ending drinking binges and at least three threats to commit suicide by drinking iodine didn’t help matters, either.

The end of Hart’s fellowship came in April, but he had little to show after an entire year in Mexico. Depressed and defeated, he made arrangements for him and Peggy to sail back to New York. “Altogether, I have had a terrible time lately,” he wrote to his stepmother on April 22. “I wouldn’t have thought of staying here another minute anyway. Do you wonder I’ve been anxious to get off as soon as possible? It certainly has made a nervous wreck of me.”

Hart and Peggy boarded a train to Veracruz the next night and left the country on the New York-bound "Orizaba" two days later. The ship reached its halfway point in Havana on April 26, when the pair accidentally separated and couldn’t find each other. They finally reunited in the liner’s medical clinic after Peggy severely burned herself from a box of matches that exploded in her hands as she lit a cigarette in the ship’s lounge.

Hart -- who had downed a few cocktails in his search for her -- was furious. In a moment of irrational thinking, he was convinced that Peggy had burned herself on purpose to grab attention. His behavior then switched gears to sympathy. And in a clear sign that his mind was unraveling, he again became infuriated, locked himself in his cabin and bolted the door shut. While it’s debatable if this particular date helped alter his frame of mind, April 26 marked Emil Opffer’s 35th birthday.

To this day, rumors and secondhand stories continue to haze the account of Hart’s last hours on the ship on Wednesday, April 27. Some passengers heard that he picked up a sailor and had a gay fling during the Havana stopover. Others recalled that he sneaked out of his room at 1 a.m. for another round of drinking, only to be escorted back at 4 a.m. by a steward. Hart even told ship personnel that a stranger attacked him in his cabin and stole his ring and wallet.

Peggy stopped by the doctor’s office later that morning to have her burns re-bandaged. She returned to her room shortly before 10 a.m. to find a nervous Hart waiting for her. He was shaking uncontrollably and said he needed a drink. At 11 a.m., a steward saw him swilling shots of whiskey in his cabin. Just before noon, Hart stuck his head into Peggy’s room to announce that he was “utterly disgraced” and abruptly left.

Dressed in pajamas and a topcoat, he walked to the top deck and leaned against the railing. He took off his coat and folded it. After a couple seconds of contemplation, he flung himself off the stern into the gulf waters. He made no effort to reach out to one of the lifeboats that had been lowered to save him. And for two hours, at the direction of Captain J.E. Blackadder, rescue crews circled the area, with Peggy and her fellow passengers watching for some sign of life. Hart was never seen again.

For decades after his suicide, critics analyzed Hart’s life, including his homosexuality. In a 1937 "Plain Dealer" review of Philip Horton’s biography, "Hart Crane," writer Ted Robinson blamed the poet’s “perverse personality” on a “terrible psychopathic handicap that set him apart from normal men and women, and alienated the major portion of his intellectuals.” The newspaper’s contributing editor, N.R. Howard, wrote in a 1962 article that Hart’s sexual orientation was an “inversion” that led to his “alcoholic, shabby and hungry” existence. And a 1981 story by reporter Tom Kaib characterized the poet’s “sexual persuasion” by mentioning “alcoholic and sexual debauches.”

On the other hand, Hart remained a literary icon among fans of his work. Performers at Kent State University’s Blossom Festival School memorialized him in a 1974 concert of his poems set to music. The school even wanted to hang a plaque on Hart’s childhood home in Garrettsville. Unfortunately, the man who owned the house served with the Ohio National Guard. Because of the shootings that killed four Kent State students during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration four years earlier, he wanted nothing to do with the university and refused to have a marker attached to his house.

But the memorials continued. Noted Cleveland sculptor and Shaw High School graduate William Mozart McVey created "The Hart Crane Memorial," a bronze statue that was installed near the intersection of East Boulevard and Bellflower Drive across the street from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The piece joined the 16-foot "Long Road" wall relief at Cleveland’s Jewish Community Center and a seven-foot-tall bronze statue of Olympic track-and-field star Jesse Owens on Lakeside Avenue as one of 48 publicly displayed sculptures in McVey’s repertoire.

The Ohio Canal Corridor also earmarked $500,000 for its historic- and cultural-enhancement initiative in 1994. The organization then purchased a half-acre of land to build Hart Crane Park at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Merwin Street near the Commodores Club in the Flats of Cleveland. The agency also bought a 1992 master work dedicated to Hart by artist and former Cleveland State University professor Gene Kangas, who designed a two-piece metal memorial flanked by two light-blue structures that simulated crashing ocean waves. Stanzas of Hart’s poetry were etched into the structure for the enjoyment of commercial and recreational boaters alike as they sailed past the park on the Cuyahoga River:

Far strum of foghorns
Fog-insulated noises
Midnight among distant chiming buoys adrift.

A tugboat wheezing by
Wreaths of steam
Lunged past a sound of waters bending astride the sky.

Follow your arches
To what corners of the sky they pull you
Where marble clouds support the sea wreck of dreams.

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Although Hart Crane’s body was never recovered, his father’s family added the inscription, “HAROLD HART CRANE, 1899-1932, LOST AT SEA,” to the base of C.A.’s tombstone in Section A, Lot 601, Plot 17 of Park Cemetery at the corner of Center Street and Brosius Road in Garrettsville. Hart was 32 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser