The idea for the poem had first come to him at the age of twenty-three while he was working for a small advertising firm in Cleveland. Its subject would be the American experience in its entirety. It would take seven years to write.

When it was done, the poem had grown into a fifty-six-page multi-section work that dealt (notes Langdon Hammer writing in The New York Review of Books) with “the tradition of New World prophecy, the frontier, the Civil War and World War I, folklore, hoboes, minstrelsy, burlesque, advertising, cinema, popular music, the nineteenth-century whaling industry, the deep time of Native American culture, and the geological formation of the North Carolina seacoast, among many other matters.

“Crane’s generation saw themselves as heralds of a new American society,” says Hammer, “more democratic, freer, and collectively dedicated to individual self-fulfillment. He understood his poem as inheriting and passing on the unfulfilled promises, the open prophecies, of America’s cultural past.” As a gay teenager, then as a young man, in Cleveland, Crane had endured shame and exclusion, dropping out of East High School as a junior and heading to New York, having promised his parents he would enroll at Columbia, and found in the city’s bohemian community a more live-and-let-live attitude. Back in Cleveland he found himself beginning to believe that, if Americans could be made to pause and contemplate their shared experience, the sheer majesty of what has been accomplished, a community based on love and mutual respect was possible.

Alas, the America of his time was not ready. And Crane eventually succumbed to despair. His body was lost at sea. But his poetry remains. And in his native Cleveland, a sculpture park has been named for him on the east bank of the Cuyahoga.

For more on the poet, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hart-crane