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RARE & SECONDHAND GAY RARE & SECONDHAND
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Plays and Poetry of Gay Interest
Plot / Content: Includes twenty-page introduction by Frank, The Bridge, White Buildings, Key West: An Island Sheaf, Uncollected Poems, Early Poems and a five-page essay by Crane on Modern Poetry. Background / Biography: The following paragraphs are extracted from the much longer Wikipedia article on Crane's life and work. "Harold Hart Crane (21 July 1899 – 27 April 1932) was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that is difficult, highly stylized, and very ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem in the vein of The Waste Land that expressed something more sincere and optimistic than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot's poetry. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has come to be seen as one of the most influential poets of his generation. "As a boy, he had a sexual relationship with an older man. He associated his sexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as a social pariah. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary in order for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work. . . . 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 a divorce, she joined Crane. 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, though, in part because he recommenced homosexual activity in spite of his relationship with Cowley. Heading back to New York from Mexico onboard the steamship SS Orizaba, he was beaten for making sexual advances to a male crew member, seeming to confirm his own idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual. Just before noon on 27 April 1932, Hart 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 throwing himself overboard. His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, 'Harold Hart Crane 1899–1932 lost at sea'. . . . "Recent queer criticism has asserted that it is particularly difficult, perhaps even inappropriate, to read many of Crane's poems – The Broken Tower, My Grandmother’s Love Letters, the Voyages series, and so on – without a willingness to look for, and uncover, homosexual meanings in the text. Tim Dean argues, for instance, that the obscurity of Crane's style owes itself 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 a kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy.'" Reviews: Arbery Books also sells secondhand and rare non-gay fiction and non-fiction. Click here for our full list. |
"I had come all way here from the sea Yet met the wave again between your arms Where cliff and citadel - all verily Dissolved within a sky of beacon forms - Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes I found Yes, tall, inseparably our days Pass sunward. We have walked the kindled skies Inexorable and girded with your praise, By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise. " And Bees of Paradise |
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