Crane, (Harold) Hart

(born July 21, 1899, Garrettsville, Ohio, U.S.—died April 27, 1932, at sea, Caribbean Sea) U.S. poet. Crane worked at a variety of jobs before settling in New York City. White Buildings (1926), his first book, includes “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.” His desire to respond to the cultural pessimism of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land resulted in the long and difficult poem The Bridge (1930), which attempts to create an epic myth of the American experience, celebrating the richness of modern life with visionary intensity. Alcoholic and despondent over his homosexuality, he committed suicide at 32 by jumping overboard from a ship in the Caribbean.