Hart Crane

Crane, Hart (Harold Crane; 1899–1932), U.S. poet. One of the earliest “modern” poets, Crane is best known for his long poem, “The Bridge” (1930). The poem was inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol of the direction and aspirations of American life, much in the way that an earlier midwestern poet, Walt Whitman, saw America through the flat, plowed prairie in Leaves of Grass. It is a difficult, mystical, and heavily symbolic work that was to exert an important influence on later poets such as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens.