Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, in 1899, Hart Crane began writing verse in his early teens. Though he never attended college, he read widely on his own. He published his first poems at the age of 16 in 1916 in Greenwich Village literary magazines. His first published poem was entitled 'C 33' after the prison cell number occupied by Oscar Wilde.

He published only two volumes of poetry during his lifetime, but those works established Crane as one of the most original and vital American poets of the 20th century. His extraordinarily complex and sonorous poetry, with its rich imagery, verbal ingenuity, and meticulous craftsmanship, curiously combines ecstatic optimism with a sense of haunted alienation. An admirer of T.

S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman. 'White Buildings' (1926), his first collection of poems, was inspired by his experience of New York City, where he had gone to live at the age of 17. His most ambitious work is 'The Bridge' (1930), a series of closely related long poems on the United States in which the Brooklyn Bridge serves as a mystical unifying symbol of civilization's evolution. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature.

Crane's personal life was anguished and turbulent. After an unhappy childhood during which he was torn between estranged parents, he held a variety of uninteresting jobs, always, however, returning to New York City and his writing. An alcoholic and a homosexual, he was constantly plagued by money problems and was often a severe trial to friends who tried to help him.in 1931 crane became for the first time involved with a woman, Peggy Baird, the ex-wife of an old friend. When David Siqueiros, the Mexican muralist, sat down to paint Crane's portrait, he said he was forced to portray the poet with eyes downcast, because otherwise there was too much desperation in his face. Crane later sliced the painting to ribbons with a razor, then drank iodine. That suicide attempt failed.in 1932 crane did commit suicide, at the age of thirty-three, by jumping from the deck of a steamship sailing back to New York from Mexico. His exit, friends noted later, reflected a line he had once written: "This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps".