A-roving on the petalled-word-crystal sea
A-roving on the petalled-word-crystal sea

Summary/Abstract: Born on 21 July 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio, as an only child of Clarence Arthur Crane (a tycoon in the candy manufacturing business, a tough man dedicated to the “gods of Commerce,” who kept his distance from his son) and Grace Hart (who desired to work in showbusiness, and was a domineering mother), Harold Hart Crane is recognized as the “poet of the Depression,” who came to call himself “the Pindar of the Machine Age,” and was called by others the “American Orpheus,” “the American Marlowe” (Bloom 2003: 11-12), “the Shelley of [the] age,” “Catullus redivivus” (Robert Lowell; apud Spears 1965: 5), the “twentieth-century poet as hero,” “the modern Whitman” who did poetic battle to prove that this age was not a hopeless Waste Land, but a Bridge triumphant (Allen Tate; apud Spears 1965: 6).

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