Bridge-Builder

THE BRIDGE--Hart Crane--Liveright ($2.50).

Poet Hart Crane was one of 16 signers of a Proclamation appearing in transition (experimentalist Paris quarterly), June 1929. Said the Proclamation: "We hereby declare that: (1) The revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact. . . . (12) The plain reader be damned." Hart Crane is noted among left-wing litterateurs for his "mighty line," is credited with writing the mightiest line now extant. In this book, a series of poems on the U. S., mighty lines abound. Examples:

"The nasal whine of power whips a new universe . . .

Where spouting pillars spoor the evening sky,

Under the looming stacks of the gigantic power house

Stars prick the eyes with sharp ammoniac proverbs,

New verities, new inklings in the velvet hummed

Of dynamos, where hearing's leash is strummed.

Power's script,--wound, bobbin-bound, refined--

Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools, spurred

Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the stars."

The description of a dirigible:

"While Cetus-like, 0 thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger

Of pendulous auroral beaches . . ."

Poet Hart Crane, young (31) but with greying hair, is native to Garrettsville, 0., son & heir to Candy Tycoon Clarence Crane. Hart Crane preferred poetry to business, went to Manhattan (1922), supported life by writing copy for J. Walter Thompson, Sweet's Architectural Catalog, others. In 1924, living in a house on Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, Poet Crane gazed at the Brooklyn Bridge, thought of writing a long Whitmanesque poem on the U. S. While he wrote it he moved about to Paterson, N. J., Isle of Pines (Cuba), Pasadena, Paris, Marseilles. Another book: White Buildings.

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