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108-586: White Buildings was the first collection (1926) of poetry by Hart Crane , an American modernist poet, critical to both lyrical and language poetic traditions. The book features well-known pieces like "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," the " Voyages " series, and some of his most famous lyrics including "My Grandmother's Love Letters" and "Chaplinesque." Harold Bloom has argued that this collection alone, if perhaps taken with his later lyric, ' The Broken Tower ,' could have secured Crane's reputation as one of

216-507: A Tony Award . Williams's work reached wider audiences in the early 1950s when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were adapted into motion pictures. Later plays also adapted for the screen included Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , The Rose Tattoo , Orpheus Descending , The Night of the Iguana , Sweet Bird of Youth , and Summer and Smoke . After the extraordinary successes of

324-778: A B.A. in English in August 1938. He later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City. Speaking of his early days as a playwright and an early collaborative play called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! , Williams wrote, "The laughter ... enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that saved my life." Around 1939, he adopted Tennessee Williams as his professional name, in acknowledgement of his Southern accent and roots. Williams's writings reference some of

432-502: A Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" A year later, his short story " The Vengeance of Nitocris " was published (as by "Thomas Lanier Williams") in the August 1928 issue of the magazine Weird Tales . These early publications did not lead to any significant recognition or appreciation of Williams's talent, and he would struggle for more than a decade to establish his writing career. Later, in 1928, Williams first visited Europe with his maternal grandfather Dakin. From 1929 to 1931, Williams attended

540-403: A Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, Williams attempted a new style that did not appeal as widely to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of

648-450: A Jewish Hospital in New York was a Rimbaud in embryo ... Fisher has shown me an amazing amount of material, some of which I am copying and will show you when I get back." Morris Greenberg, Samuel's brother, had given five of Samuel's notebooks to Fisher so that he could get them published. Crane copied forty-two poems from the notebooks, which he borrowed from Fisher for a period of less than

756-635: A Salesman . Much of Williams's most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays, and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame . Thomas Lanier Williams III was born in Columbus, Mississippi , of English, Welsh, and Huguenot ancestry, the second child of Edwina Dakin (August 9, 1884 – June 1, 1980) and Cornelius Coffin "C. C." Williams (August 21, 1879 – March 27, 1957). His father

864-422: A combination of "sweetness" and "beastliness". Because Carroll had a drug problem, as did Williams, friends including Maria Britneva saw the relationship as destructive. Williams wrote that Carroll played on his "acute loneliness" as an aging gay man. When the two men broke up in 1979, Williams called Carroll a "twerp", but they remained friends until Williams died four years later. On February 25, 1983, Williams

972-437: A divorce, she joined Crane. The two began a romantic relationship on December 25, 1931. As far as is known, she was his only heterosexual partner. " The Broken Tower ", one of his last published poems, emerged from that affair. Crane still felt himself a failure, in part because he recommenced his homosexual activities despite his relationship with Cowley. He claimed he would commit suicide multiple times. "The Broken Tower"

1080-524: A draft of the "Cape Hatteras" section, a key part of his panegyric poem. In late June that year, Crane returned from the south of France to Paris. Crosby noted in his journal, "Hart C. back from Marseilles where he slept with his thirty sailors and he began again to drink Cutty Sark ." Crane got drunk at the Cafe Select and fought with waiters over his tab. When the Paris police were called, he fought with them and

1188-411: A foreword to it; and many critics since have used Crane's difficulty as an excuse for a quick dismissal. O'Neill did, however, write a draft for such a foreword. The text said of Crane that "the great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader, is naturally, the style. The theme never appears in explicit statement". The publisher Harcourt rejected White Buildings , with Harrison Smith writing Crane

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1296-432: A kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy." Thomas Yingling objects to the traditional, New Critical and Eliotic readings of Crane, arguing that the "American myth criticism and formalist readings" have "depolarized and normalized our reading of American poetry, making any homosexual readings seem perverse ." Even more than

1404-656: A loan of $ 1,000. After parting with the Opffers, Crane left for Paris in early 1929, but continued to struggle with his mental health. His drinking became notably worse during the late 1920s, while he was finishing The Bridge . He visited his father, who had started an inn in the vicinity of Chagrin Falls, Ohio , in 1931. Crane visited Mexico in 1931–32 on a Guggenheim Fellowship , and his drinking continued as he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. When Peggy Cowley , wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley , agreed to

1512-496: A long Broadway run. Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams's greatest successes) said of Williams: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." The Glass Menagerie won the award for the best play of the season, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. The huge success of his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire , cemented his reputation as a great playwright in 1947. During

1620-711: A modest house in Key West, Florida were Williams's happiest and most productive. Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Williams returned to him and cared for him until his death on September 20, 1963. In the years following Merlo's death, Williams descended into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use, which resulted in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities. He submitted to injections by Dr. Max Jacobson , known popularly as Dr. Feelgood, who used increasing amounts of amphetamines to overcome his depression. Jacobson combined these with prescriptions for

1728-570: A month. Many of Crane's poems consisted of lines and phrases taken from Greenberg's poems, always unattributed. Crane's poem "Emblems of Conduct", the third in White Buildings , consisted solely of rearranged lines from Greenberg's poems. The plagiarism went unnoticed for decades until Marc Simon published Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane and the Lost Manuscripts in 1978, detailing how Crane copied from Greenberg. Scholarly interpretation over

1836-615: A new light shed From penitence, must needs bring pain, And with it song of minor, broken strain. But you who hear the lamp whisper thru night Can trace paths tear-wet, and forget all blight. Hart Crane's "C33" as published in Bruno's Weekly in 1917. Crane's first published work was the poem "C33", which was published in the Greenwich journal Bruno's Weekly in 1917 in a feature entitled "Oscar Wilde: Poems in His Praise". The poem

1944-660: A new narrative. The show premiered at the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. The show was recorded on CD and distributed by Ghostlight Records . In 2014 Williams was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk , a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields." In 2015, The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans

2052-424: A personal or political problem, though, Yingling argues that such "biases" obscure much of what the poems make clear; he cites, for instance, the last lines of "My Grandmother's Love Letters" from White Buildings as a haunting description of estrangement from the norms of ( heterosexual ) family life: Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand; And so I stumble. And

2160-585: A play about rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman to receive honorable mention in a writing competition. At University of Missouri, Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but he did not fit in well with his fraternity brothers. After he failed a military training course in his junior year, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at the International Shoe Company factory. Although Williams hated

2268-527: A secretary for a stockbroker visiting California. Crane's mother, following her second marriage breakup, was living in the Los Angeles area . He revealed his homosexuality to her, causing a confrontation and Crane sneaking out on May 15, 1928, never to see her again. He later found out about the death of his grandmother, Elizabeth Hart, but his mother refused to pay him the $ 5,000 inheritance until he returned to live with her. He managed to convince her to give him

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2376-507: A sense of failure. His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge , intended to be an uplifting counter to Eliot's The Waste Land . The Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem's central symbol and its poetic starting point. Crane found a place to start his synthesis in Brooklyn. Arts patron Otto H. Kahn gifted him $ 2,000 to begin work on the panegyric poem, though he requested

2484-422: A sequence of erotic poems. They were written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner, whom "Voyages" is generally considered to be about. "Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land , he also said it

2592-654: A thing as a great style which was ... not ... applied to any subject at all." Crane returned to New York in 1928 following a hurricane which left the Cuban residence damaged, and began living with friends and taking temporary jobs as a copywriter, or living off unemployment and the charity of friends and his father. For a time he lived in Brooklyn at 77 Willow Street until his lover, Opffer, invited him to live in Opffer's father's home at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights . Crane

2700-495: A toxic level of Seconal . He wrote in his will in 1972: I, Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams, being in sound mind upon this subject, and having declared this wish repeatedly to my close friends-do hereby state my desire to be buried at sea. More specifically, I wish to be buried at sea at as close a possible point as the American poet Hart Crane died by choice in the sea; this would be ascrnatible [sic], this geographic point, by

2808-543: A very young age: I was preadolescent, ten or eleven years old. I still remember the extraordinary delight, the extraordinary force that Crane and Blake brought to me—in particular Blake's rhetoric in the longer poems—though I had no notion what they were about. I picked up a copy of The Collected Poems of Hart Crane in the Bronx Library. I still remember when I lit upon the page with the extraordinary trope, "O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits / The agile precincts of

2916-439: A worker in his father's factory. In 1925, he briefly lived with Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate . The two had a dispute with Crane due to the mess his belongings made throughout the house. Additionally, Crane and Tate had a disagreement over the negative outlook of T. S. Eliot 's work. This prompted them to leave two letters under his door requesting that he move out, which he complied with. He wrote his mother and grandmother in

3024-482: A year before his death. Contemporary opinion was mixed, with poets including Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens criticizing his work and others, including William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings , praising it. William Rose Benét wrote that, with The Bridge , Crane "failed in creating what might have been a truly great poem" but that it "reveals potencies in the author that may make his next work even more remarkable." His last work, " The Broken Tower " (1932),

3132-674: A young woman. In 1943, as her behavior became increasingly disturbing, she was subjected to a lobotomy , requiring her to be institutionalised for the rest of her life. As soon as he was financially able, Williams moved Rose to a private institution just north of New York City , where he often visited her. He gave her a percentage interest in several of his most successful plays, the royalties from which were applied toward her care. The devastating effects of Rose's treatment may have contributed to Williams's alcoholism and his dependence on various combinations of amphetamines and barbiturates . After some early attempts at relationships with women, by

3240-578: Is "a genuine poet ... [but White Buildings ] is really the most perplexing kind of poetry." A young Tennessee Williams , then falling in love with Crane's poetry, could "hardly understand a single line—of course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect." Crane was aware that his poetry was difficult. Some of his essays originated as encouraging epistles, explications and stylistic apologies to editors, updates to his patron, and both well-considered or impulsive letters to friends. It

3348-671: Is buried. According to the New York Times , "most of his estate was left to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., with the bulk of it to remain in trust for his sister during her lifetime." Rose Williams, Tennessee's sister, died in 1996 after many years in a mental institution in New York state; the university subsequently received about $ 7 million, which supports a creative writing program. From February 1 to July 21, 2011, to commemorate

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3456-508: Is generally undisputed. Written early in the year and finished two months prior to his death, the poem was rejected by Poetry Magazine , and only appeared in print (in the June 1932 edition of The New Republic ) after Crane's death by water. Crane and Peggy both decided to return to New York on the steamship Orizaba , in April 1932 because Crane's stepmother had invited him back to settle

3564-649: Is mostly to be found in his letters: he corresponded regularly with Allen Tate , Yvor Winters , and Gorham Munson , and shared critical dialogues with Eugene O'Neill , William Carlos Williams , E. E. Cummings , Sherwood Anderson , Kenneth Burke , Waldo Frank , Harriet Monroe , Marianne Moore , and Gertrude Stein . He was also an acquaintance of H. P. Lovecraft , who would eventually voice concern over Crane's premature aging due to alcohol abuse. Selections of Crane's letters are available in many editions of his poetry. His two most famous stylistic defenses emerged from correspondences: his "General Aims and Theories" (1925)

3672-583: Is named after Oscar Wilde's cell in The Ballad of Reading Gaol and his name appeared misspelled in print as "Harold H Crone". The style he would use in his later books is apparent in poems written at the time. Crane dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year in December 1916 and left for New York City , promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University . His parents, in

3780-429: Is named for him. The Tennessee Williams Key West Exhibit on Truman Avenue houses rare Williams memorabilia, photographs, and pictures including his famous typewriter. At the time of his death, Williams had been working on a final play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere , which attempted to reconcile certain forces and facts of his own life. This was a continuing theme in his work. As of September 2007, author Gore Vidal

3888-519: Is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension." There is also some mention of it, though it is not so much presented as a critical neologism , in his letter to Harriet Monroe: "The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology." L. S. Dembo's influential study of The Bridge , Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (1960), reads this 'logic' well within

3996-440: Is the last poem meant to be published by poet Hart Crane in 1932. He intended it to be "an epic of the modern consciousness." In keeping with the varieties and difficulties of Crane criticism, the poem has been interpreted widely—as a death ode, life ode, process poem, visionary poem, and a poem on failed vision—but its biographical impetus out of Crane's first heterosexual affair (with Peggy Cowley, estranged wife of Malcolm Cowley)

4104-689: The Poetry Foundation website, analyzing the poem based strictly on the content of the text itself and not on outside political or cultural matters. In mid-December 1926, Crane visited William Murrell Fisher in Woodstock, a literary critic whom he first met via their mutual friend Gorham Munson . There, Fisher shared with Crane multiple manuscripts of poems by Samuel Greenberg ,a little-known poet who had died in 1917. Writing to Gorham Munson on December 20, Crane wrote "This poet, Grünberg, [ sic ] which Fisher nursed until he died of consumption at

4212-544: The Shelley of my age, / must lay his heart out for my bed and board." Lowell thought that Crane was the most important American poet of the generation to come of age in the 1920s, stating that "[Crane] got out more than anybody else ... he somehow got New York City ; he was at the center of things in the way that no other poet was." Lowell also described Crane as being "less limited than any other poet of his generation." Tennessee Williams said that he wanted to be "given back to

4320-591: The U.S. Navy during World War II . This was the enduring romantic relationship of Williams's life, and it lasted 14 years until infidelities and drug abuse on both sides ended it. Merlo, who had become Williams's personal secretary, took on most of the details of their domestic life. He provided a period of happiness and stability, acting as a balance to the playwright's frequent bouts with depression. Williams feared that, like his sister Rose, he would fall into insanity. His years with Merlo, in an apartment in Manhattan and

4428-563: The University of Missouri in Columbia , where he enrolled in journalism classes. He was bored by his classes and distracted by unrequited love for a girl. Soon he began entering his poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests, hoping to earn extra income. His first submitted play was Beauty Is the Word (1930), followed by Hot Milk at Three in the Morning (1932). As recognition for Beauty,

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4536-548: The 100th anniversary of his birth, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the home of Williams's archive, exhibited 250 of his personal items. The exhibit, titled "Becoming Tennessee Williams", included a collection of Williams manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and artwork. The Ransom Center holds the earliest and largest collections of Williams's papers, including all of his earliest manuscripts,

4644-410: The 1940s and 1950s, he had more personal turmoil and theatrical failures in the 1960s and 1970s. Although he continued to write every day, the quality of his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption, as well as occasional poor choices of collaborators. In 1963, his partner Frank Merlo died. Consumed by depression over the loss, and in and out of treatment facilities while under

4752-451: The 1970s, when he was in his 60s, Williams had a lengthy relationship with Robert Carroll, a Vietnam War veteran and aspiring writer in his 20s. Williams had deep affection for Carroll and respect for what he saw as the younger man's talents. Along with Williams's sister Rose, Carroll was one of the two people who received a bequest in Williams's will. Williams described Carroll's behavior as

4860-591: The French Romantics Baudelaire and Rimbaud". One notable review of the book was mixed. In The New Republic , Edmund Wilson wrote that Crane had "a remarkable style.. almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style...[but it's] not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all". Crane responded to this criticism by calling Wilson's article "half-baked". The poet and critic Randall Jarrell singled out "the mesmeric rhetoric of [the poem] 'Voyages II' [as] one of

4968-638: The Rockefeller funds, Williams moved to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded program of the New Deal era. Williams lived for a time in New Orleans' French Quarter , including 722 Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré . The building is now part of The Historic New Orleans Collection . The Rockefeller grant brought him to

5076-644: The Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival has been held annually in New Orleans, Louisiana, in commemoration of the playwright. The festival takes place at the end of March to coincide with Williams's birthday. The Tennessee Williams Songbook is a one woman show written and directed by David Kaplan, a Williams scholar and curator of Provincetown 's Tennessee Williams Festival, and starring Tony Award nominated actress Alison Fraser . The show features songs taken from plays of Williams's canon, woven together with text to create

5184-521: The age away." Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. His father was a successful Ohio restaurateur and businessman who invented the Life Savers candy and held the patent , but sold it for $ 2,900 before the brand became popular. He made other candy and accumulated a fortune from the business with chocolate bars. Clarence Crane's sister, Alice Crane Williams ,

5292-435: The alphabet every breath or two? In the minds of people who have sensitively read, seen, and experienced a great deal, isn't there a terminology something like short-hand as compared to usual description and dialectics, which the artist ought to be right in trusting as a reasonable connective agent toward fresh concepts, more inclusive evaluations? Monroe was not impressed, though she acknowledged that others were, and printed

5400-630: The attention of the Hollywood film industry and Williams received a six-month contract as a writer from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio, earning $ 250 weekly. During the winter of 1944–45, his memory play The Glass Menagerie, developed from his 1943 short story "Portrait of a Girl in Glass", was produced in Chicago and garnered good reviews. It moved to New York where it became an instant hit and enjoyed

5508-478: The avant-garde respect which was later cemented by the 1926 publication of White Buildings . On May 1, 1926, he went to Isla de la Juventud to reside in his mother's family residence there. He received a contract from Liveright Publishing to publish White Buildings in July. White Buildings contains many of Crane's most well-received and popular poems, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen", and "Voyages",

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5616-656: The beginning of "East Coker", which is reminiscent of the final section of "The River", from The Bridge . Yvor Winters and Allen Tate both praised White Buildings but considered The Bridge to be a failure. Mid-century American poets, such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell , cited Crane as a significant influence. Both poets also wrote about Crane in their poetry. Berryman wrote him one of his famous elegies in The Dream Songs , and Lowell published his "Words for Hart Crane" in Life Studies (1959): "Who asks for me,

5724-416: The best American poets of the 20th century. Eugene O'Neill was happy to help Crane by writing a preface to White Buildings , but, increasingly frustrated with his failure to articulate an understanding of the poems, left it to Allen Tate to finish the piece. According to the Poetry Foundation , "this work earned [Crane] substantial respect as an imposing stylist, one whose lyricism and imagery recalled

5832-506: The control of his mother and brother Dakin, Williams spiraled downward. His plays Kingdom of Earth (1967), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small Craft Warnings (1973), The Two Character Play (also called Out Cry , 1973), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1976), Vieux Carré (1978), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), and others were all box office failures. Negative press notices wore down his spirit. His last play, A House Not Meant to Stand,

5940-421: The drag." Between 1948 and 1959 Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway: Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959, he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes , three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards , and

6048-406: The early 1920s, various small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him among the avant-garde a respect that White Buildings ratified and strengthened. His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge , intended to be an uplifting counter to T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land (1922). Initial critical reaction to it was mixed, with many praising

6156-659: The estate of his father, who had died the month prior. This was the same ship aboard which he had gone to Cuba in 1926. The Orizaba departed from Vera Cruz, Mexico on April 23 and stopped at Havana, Cuba on April 26. While aboard, Crane was assaulted after making sexual advances to a male crew member. Just before noon on April 27, 1932, Crane jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico . Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before jumping overboard. The ship

6264-449: The exchange alongside the poem: You find me testing metaphors, and poetic concept in general, too much by logic, whereas I find you pushing logic to the limit in a painfully intellectual search for emotion, for poetic motive. Crane had a relatively well-developed rhetoric for the defense of his poems; here is an excerpt from "General Aims and Theories": New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation. ...the voice of

6372-470: The familiar rhetoric of the Romantics : "The Logic of metaphor was simply the written form of the 'bright logic' of the imagination, the crucial sign stated, the Word made words.... As practiced, the logic of metaphor theory is reducible to a fairly simple linguistic principle: the symbolized meaning of an image takes precedence over its literal meaning; regardless of whether the vehicle of an image makes sense,

6480-636: The festival produced A Streetcar Named Desire . The U.S. Postal Service honored Williams on a stamp issued on October 13, 1995 as part of its literary arts series. Williams is honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame . He is also inducted into the Clarksdale Walk of Fame . On October 17, 2019, the Mississippi Writers Trail installed a historical marker commemorating William's literary contributions during his namesake festival produced by

6588-690: The intent and morality of Hart Crane's actions varies. Writer and critic Samuel R. Delany argues Crane merely tried to draw attention to an unknown poet and wanted readers to experience for themselves the delight of realizing one of his influences without him telling them. Crane was admired by artists including Eugene O'Neill , Kenneth Burke , Edmund Wilson , E. E. Cummings , Tennessee Williams and William Carlos Williams . Although Crane had his sharp critics, among them Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound , Moore did publish his work, as did T. S. Eliot, who, moving even further out of Pound's sphere, may have borrowed some of Crane's imagery for Four Quartets , in

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6696-503: The introduction to the centennial edition of the Complete Poems of Hart Crane . Thomas Lux has stated, "If the devil came to me and said 'Tom, you can be dead and Hart can be alive,' I'd take the deal in a heartbeat if the devil promised, when arisen, Hart would have to go straight into A.A. " Tennessee Williams Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams ,

6804-498: The lark's return." I was just swept away by it, by the Marlovian rhetoric . I still have the flavor of that book in me. Indeed it's the first book I ever owned. I begged my oldest sister to give it to me, and I still have the old black and gold edition she gave me for my birthday back in 1942 . . . I suppose the only poet of the twentieth century that I could secretly set above Yeats and Stevens would be Hart Crane. Bloom also authored

6912-469: The late 1930s, Williams began exploring his homosexuality. In New York City, he joined a gay social circle that included fellow writer and close friend Donald Windham (1920–2010) and Windham's then-boyfriend Fred Melton. In the summer of 1940, Williams initiated a relationship with Kip Kiernan (1918–1944), a young dancer he met in Provincetown, Massachusetts . When Kiernan left him to marry a woman, Williams

7020-565: The late 1930s, he worked at a string of menial jobs that included a stint as caretaker on a chicken ranch in Laguna Beach , California. In 1939, with the help of his agent Audrey Wood , Williams was awarded a $ 1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition of his play Battle of Angels . It was produced in Boston , Massachusetts in 1940 and was poorly received. Using some of

7128-458: The late 1940s and 1950s, Williams began to travel widely with his partner Frank Merlo (1922 – September 21, 1963), often spending summers in Europe. He moved often to stimulate his writing, living in New York, New Orleans, Key West , Rome, Barcelona , and London. Williams wrote, "Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift,

7236-550: The mid-1930s his mother separated from his father due to his worsening alcoholism and abusive temper. They agreed to a legal separation in 1946 but never divorced. In 1936, Williams enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis where he wrote the play Me, Vashya (1937). After not winning the school's poetry prize, he decided to drop out. In the autumn of 1937, he transferred to the University of Iowa in Iowa City , where he graduated with

7344-515: The middle of their divorce proceedings, were upset. Crane took various copywriting jobs and moved between friends' apartments in Manhattan. Crane's mother and father were constantly fighting, and they divorced on April 14, 1917. The same year, he attempted to enlist in the military, but was rejected due to being a minor. He worked in a munitions plant until the end of World War I . Between 1917 and 1924, he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, working as an advertising copywriter and

7452-633: The money and left for Europe towards late November and intended to live in Majorca , but instead went first to London then to Paris. In Paris in February 1929, Harry Crosby , who with his wife Caresse Crosby owned the fine arts press Black Sun Press , offered Crane the use of their country retreat, Le Moulin du Soleil in Ermenonville . They hoped he could use the time to concentrate on completing The Bridge . Crane spent several weeks at their estate where he wrote

7560-404: The monotony, the job forced him out of the gentility of his upbringing. His dislike of his new 9-to-5 routine drove Williams to write prodigiously. He set a goal of writing one story a week. Williams often worked on weekends and late into the night. His mother recalled his intensity: Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in

7668-574: The most beautiful of all of those poems in which love, death, and sleep 'are fused for an instant in one floating flower ' ". This poetry -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Hart Crane Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. He dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year and left for New York City , promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University . Crane took various jobs, including in copywriting and advertising. Throughout

7776-445: The motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor,' which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which

7884-597: The papers of his mother Edwina Williams, and those of his long-time agent Audrey Wood . In late 2009, Williams was inducted into the Poets' Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. Performers and artists who took part in his induction included Vanessa Redgrave , playwright John Guare , Eli Wallach , Sylvia Miles , Gregory Mosher , and Ben (Griessmeyer) Berry. The Tennessee Williams Theatre in Key West, Florida,

7992-434: The poets and writers he most admired in his early years: Hart Crane , Arthur Rimbaud , Anton Chekhov , William Shakespeare , Clarence Darrow , D. H. Lawrence , Katherine Mansfield , August Strindberg , William Faulkner , Thomas Wolfe , Emily Dickinson , William Inge , James Joyce , and, according to some, Ernest Hemingway . As Williams was struggling to gain production and an audience for his work in

8100-423: The present, if it is to be known, must be caught at the risk of speaking in idioms and circumlocutions sometimes shocking to the scholar and historians of logic. As a child, he had a sexual relationship with a man. Criticism since the late 20th century has suggested reading Crane's poems—" The Broken Tower ", "My Grandmother's Love Letters", the " Voyages " series, and others—with an eye to homosexual meanings in

8208-480: The rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter. Brian Reed has contributed to a project of critical reintegration of queer criticism with other critical methods, suggesting that an overemphasis on the sexual biography of Crane's poetry can skew a broader appreciation of his overall work. In one example of Reed's approach, he published a close reading of Crane's lyric poem, "Voyages", (a love poem that Crane wrote for his lover Emil Opffer) on

8316-438: The reader is expected to grasp its tenor." The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea. From "Repose of Rivers" from White Buildings (1926) The publication of White Buildings was delayed by Eugene O'Neill 's struggle (and eventual failure) to articulate his appreciation in

8424-599: The relationship. Rodríguez and Williams remained friends, however, and were in contact as late as the 1970s. Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of a young man named "Rafaello" in Williams' Memoirs . He provided financial assistance to the younger man for several years afterward. Williams drew from this for his first novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone . When he returned to New York City, Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo (1921–1963). An occasional actor of Sicilian ancestry, he had served in

8532-468: The residence opposite the Hart's. Hart Crane began attending East High School around 1913–1914. He has woven rose-vines About the empty heart of night, And vented his long mellowed wines Of dreaming on the desert white With searing sophistry. And he tented with far truths he would form The transient bosoms from the thorny tree. O Materna! to enrich thy gold head And wavering shoulders with

8640-430: The river! It's really a magnificent place to live. This section of Brooklyn is very old, but all the houses are in splendid condition and have not been invaded by foreigners... Based on Crane's letters, New York was where he felt most at home. Additionally, much of his poetry takes place there. Throughout the early 1920s, many small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him among

8748-477: The scope but criticizing the quality of the poems. On April 27, 1932, Crane, in an inebriated state, jumped off the steamship USS Orizaba and into the Gulf of Mexico while the ship was en route to New York. He left no suicide note, but witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal. Throughout his life, he had multiple homosexual relations, many of which were described by, or otherwise influenced, his poetry. He had one known female partner, Peggy Cowley , around

8856-426: The sea" at the "point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back". One of Williams's last plays, a "ghost play" titled Steps Must Be Gentle , explores Crane's relationship with his mother. In a 1991 interview with Antonio Weiss of The Paris Review , the literary critic Harold Bloom talked about how Crane, along with William Blake , initially sparked his interest in literature at

8964-480: The second. In [his] stories and in those plays, Tennessee validated with his genius our common ticket of transfer."—Biographer and critic Gore Vidal in the Introduction to Tennessee Williams: Collected Stories (1985) Since 2016, St. Louis, Missouri has held an annual Tennessee Williams Festival, featuring a main production and related events such as literary discussions and new plays inspired by his work. In 2018

9072-538: The sedative Seconal to relieve his insomnia. During this time, influenced by his brother, a Roman Catholic convert, Williams joined the Catholic Church, however he never attributed much significance to religion in his personal life. He was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely overcome his dependence on prescription drugs. As Williams grew older, he felt increasingly alone; he feared old age and losing his sexual appeal to younger gay men. In

9180-461: The silent house. Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes. Overworked, unhappy, and lacking further success with his writing, by his 24th birthday Williams had suffered a nervous breakdown and left his job. Memories of this period and of a particular factory co-worker would contribute to the character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire . By

9288-537: The spring of 1924: Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the Statue of Liberty, way down the harbour, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right! All of the great new skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are marshaled directly across from you, and there is a constant stream of tugs, liners, sail boats, etc in procession before you on

9396-405: The text. Queer theorist Tim Dean argues that the obscurity of Crane's style owes partially to the necessities of being a semi-public homosexual—not quite closeted , but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open: "The intensity responsible for Crane's particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces

9504-530: The various books (biographical) upon his life and death. I wish to be sewn up in a canvas sack and dropped overboard, as stated above, as close as possible to where Hart Crane was given by himself to the great mother of life which is the sea: the Caribbean, specifically, if that fits the geography of his death. Otherwise—whereever fits it [sic]. However, his brother Dakin Williams arranged for him to be buried at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, where his mother

9612-401: Was "so damned dead", an impasse, and characterized by a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities". Crane's self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America". Edmund Wilson said Crane had "a style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style, if there could be such

9720-488: Was a composer and literary editor. In 1894, the family moved to Warren, Ohio where his father opened a maple syrup company, which he sold in 1908 to Corn Products Refining Company . In April 1911, his father opened a chocolate manufacturing and retailing company, the Crane Chocolate Company. The family moved to Cleveland in 1911, into a house at 1709 East 115th Street. In 1913, Clarence Crane's parents purchased

9828-541: Was a traveling shoe salesman who became an alcoholic and was frequently away from home. His mother, Edwina, was the daughter of Rose O. Dakin, a music teacher, and the Reverend Walter Dakin, an Episcopal priest from Illinois who was assigned to a parish in Clarksdale, Mississippi , shortly after Williams's birth. Williams lived in his grandfather's Episcopal rectory with his family for much of his early childhood and

9936-481: Was about 300 miles (500 km) from Cuba. An article the following day from the New York Times linked his death to his father's. His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone at Park Cemetery outside Garrettsville, Portage County, Ohio includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899–1932 lost at sea". Crane was heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot , in particular The Waste Land . The Bridge

10044-434: Was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller , he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. At age 33, after years of obscurity, Williams suddenly became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on

10152-501: Was beaten. They arrested and jailed him, fining him 800 francs. After Hart had spent six days in prison at La Santé , Crosby paid Crane's fine and advanced him money for the passage back to the United States, where he finished The Bridge . In January 1930, the work was published by Black Sun Press in Paris and subsequently by Boni & Liveright in the United States in April. The work received poor reviews, and Crane struggled with

10260-411: Was close to his grandparents. Among his ancestors was musician and poet Sidney Lanier . He had two siblings, older sister Rose Isabel Williams (1909–1996) and younger brother Walter Dakin Williams (1919 –2008). As a young child, Williams nearly died from a case of diphtheria that left him frail and virtually confined to his house during a year of recuperation. At least partly due to his illness, he

10368-489: Was completing the play, and Peter Bogdanovich was slated to direct its Broadway debut. The play received its world premiere in New York City in April 2012, directed by David Schweizer and starring Shirley Knight as Babe. The rectory of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Columbus, Mississippi, where Williams's grandfather Dakin was rector at the time of Williams's birth, was moved to another location in 1993 for preservation. It

10476-545: Was considered a weak child by his father. Cornelius Williams, a descendant of East Tennessee pioneers, had a violent temper and was prone to use his fists. He regarded what he thought was his son's effeminacy with disdain. Edwina, locked in an unhappy marriage, focused her attention almost entirely on her frail young son. Critics and historians agree that Williams drew from his own dysfunctional family in much of his writing and that his desire to break free from his puritan upbringing propelled him towards writing. When Williams

10584-465: Was distraught. Kiernan's death four years later at age 26 was another heavy blow. On a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico , Williams met Pancho Rodríguez y González, a hotel clerk of Mexican heritage. Rodríguez was prone to jealous rages and excessive drinking, and their relationship was tempestuous. In February 1946, Rodríguez left New Mexico to join Williams in his New Orleans apartment. They lived and traveled together until late 1947, when Williams ended

10692-667: Was eight years old, his father was promoted to a job at the home office of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis . His mother's continual search for a more appropriate home, as well as his father's heavy drinking and loudly turbulent behavior, caused them to move numerous times around St. Louis. Williams attended Soldan High School , a setting he referred to in his play The Glass Menagerie . Later he studied at University City High School . At age 16, Williams won third prize for an essay published in Smart Set , titled "Can

10800-569: Was found dead at age 71 in his suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York City . Chief Medical Examiner of New York City Elliot M. Gross reported that Williams had choked to death from inhaling the plastic cap of a bottle of the type used on bottles of nasal spray or eye solution. The report was later corrected on August 14, 1983, to state that Williams had been using the plastic cap found in his mouth to ingest barbiturates and had actually died from

10908-405: Was founded by Co-Artistic Directors Nick Shackleford and Augustin J Correro. The New Orleans–based non-profit theatre company is the first year-round professional theatre company that focuses exclusively on the works of Williams. "[T]here used to be two streetcars in New Orleans. One was named Desire and the other was called Cemeteries . To get where you were going, you changed from the first to

11016-455: Was intended to be a more optimistic view of society than that of The Waste Land . He first read The Waste Land in the November 1922 edition of The Dial . Walt Whitman , William Blake , Ralph Waldo Emerson , and Emily Dickinson were also particularly influential to Crane. As a teenager, Crane also read Plato , Honoré de Balzac , and Percy Bysshe Shelley . Crane's critical effort

11124-563: Was newly renovated in 2010 for use by the City of Columbus as the Tennessee Williams Welcome Center. Williams's literary legacy is represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt . In 1985, French author-composer Michel Berger wrote a song dedicated to Tennessee Williams, " Quelque chose de Tennessee " (Something of Tennessee), for Johnny Hallyday . It became one of the singer's more famous songs. Since 1986,

11232-452: Was only his exchange with Harriet Monroe at Poetry , when she initially refused to print "At Melville's Tomb", that urged Crane to describe his "logic of metaphor" in print: If the poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and logic—what field of added consciousness and increased perceptions (the actual province of poetry, if not lullabies) can be expected when one has to relatively return to

11340-476: Was overjoyed at the views the location afforded him. The first known mention of The Bridge was in a 1923 letter to Gorham Munson in which he wrote: I am ruminating on a new longish poem under the title of The Bridge which carries on further the tendencies manifest in 'F and H.' It will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish it as I see it now, so much time will be wasted in thinking about it. Crane moved to Paterson, New Jersey , in 1927. In 1928, he worked as

11448-504: Was produced in Chicago in 1982. Despite largely positive reviews, it ran for only 40 performances. In 1974, Williams received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1979, four years before his death, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame . Throughout his life, Williams remained close to his sister, Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as

11556-402: Was unfinished and published posthumously. Crane has been praised by several playwrights, poets, and literary critics, including Robert Lowell , Derek Walcott , Tennessee Williams , and Harold Bloom ; the latter called him "a High Romantic in the era of High Modernism". Allen Tate called Crane "one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give

11664-467: Was written to urge Eugene O'Neill's critical foreword to White Buildings , then passed around among friends, yet unpublished during Crane's life; and the famous "Letter to Harriet Monroe" (1926) was part of an exchange for the publication of "At Melville's Tomb" in Poetry . Crane's most quoted criticism is in the circulated, if long and unpublished, "General Aims and Theories": "As to technical considerations:

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