Driving by Hart Crane, poet.

It's becoming ever more difficult to find something, or someone, to blog about who or which hasn't already been "done", often numerous times. Example, the other day I set about looking for another lesser-known poet to investigate via bio, poems and natal chart. Hart Crane came up. He seemed like an interesting, yet tragically short-lived poet; he led a life of variable excesses, gay or bi-sexual, alcoholic... then put an early end to it himself.

Nutshell version from learner.org:

Hart Crane's reputation rests primarily on his extraordinary craftsmanship and sweeping vision. In The Bridge, Crane set out to write an American epic that unified past and present, East and West, myth and reality. Crane's poetic vision, based on views that alcoholic and sexual excesses were a way to achieve a perception of unity of all things, led to self-destructive behavior, and his short, turbulent life ended in suicide.

From poets.org

Born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, Harold Hart Crane was a highly anxious and volatile child. He began writing verse in his early teenage years, and though he never attended college, read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne, and the nineteenth-century French poets Vildrac, Laforgue, and Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.

Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman.

His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932, at the age of thirty-two, by jumping from the deck of a steamship sailing back to New York from Mexico.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.
Harold Hart Crane


Carmen de Boheme

Sinuously winding through the room
On smokey tongues of sweetened cigarettes, --
Plaintive yet proud the cello tones resume
The andante of smooth hopes and lost regrets.

Bright peacocks drink from flame-pots by the wall,
Just as absinthe-sipping women shiver through
With shimmering blue from the bowl in Circe's hall.
Their brown eyes blacken, and the blue drop hue.

The andante quivers with crescendo's start,
And dies on fire's birth in each man's heart.
The tapestry betrays a finger through
The slit, soft-pulling; -- -- -- and music follows cue.

There is a sweep, -- a shattering, -- a choir
Disquieting of barbarous fantasy.
The pulse is in the ears, the heart is higher,
And stretches up through mortal eyes to see.

Carmen! Akimbo arms and smouldering eyes; --
Carmen! Bestirring hope and lipping eyes; --
Carmen whirls, and music swirls and dips.
"Carmen!," comes awed from wine-hot lips.

Finale leaves in silence to replume
Bent wings, and Carmen with her flaunts through the gloom
Of whispering tapestry, brown with old fringe: --
The winers leave too, and the small lamps twinge.

Morning: and through the foggy city gate
A gypsy wagon wiggles, striving straight.
And some dream still of Carmen's mystic face, --
Yellow, pallid, like ancient lace.
Harold Hart Crane

 Data from astro.com

Having discovered that much, and a couple of his shorter, simpler poems, see above, I looked at his natal chart, noted the T-square linking Pluto/Neptune to Saturn with Mars at the apex. Then Google threw up a blog called Astrology of a Trainwreck, the blogger had noticed that Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway shared a birthday. Here's a link to that post:

Birthday twins July 21 Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane Genius and Suicide.



Hemingway, by the way, had Virgo rising, according to astro-databank HERE, also Moon in Capricorn.

So someone got there before me - again - and had found an interesting side issue. The post isn't dated year-wise, but appears to come from a few years ago.

Other notables from Crane's natal chart: If time of birth is reliable: Pisces rising, Sun and Venus in Cancer, and Jupiter in Scorpio - all the highly emotional water signs are represented. A strict Capricorn Moon opposing Cancerian arty Venus strikes a discordant note.

Neptune and Pluto close together in Gemini and opposite Saturn would have played a part in a whole group of people's nativities, those planets being slow movers. It's the fact that, in this case they link up to a quicker moving, so personal planet, Mars which makes the resulting network here personally significant to Crane.