There is no other poet in our history quite like Harry Crosby. He is above all else a poet of one unforgiving obsession: the image of the sun and every variation he can ring on it in poems of ecstatic incantation. Poems like "Pharmacie Du Soleil" should be read aloud, preferably by a score of people speaking either in unison or in counterpoint. Born Henry Sturgis Crosby into an upper class Boston family, his education at privileged Boston schools gives little anticipation of the iconoclastic Paris expatriate of the 1920s. But World War I changed him. He enlisted in the Ambulance Corps, went through the slaughter at Verdun, watched his own ambulance blown to bits while he was barely thirty feet away, and commemorated the moment as his "death day" every year thereafter. He won the Croix de Guerre medal at the end, but returned home radically alienated. At Harvard, he fell in love in 1920 with Mary Phelps Jacob Peabody, a married woman who later changed her name to Caresse. Hoping to end the relationship, Crosby's mother arranged a job for him at uncle J.P. Morgan's Paris bank, but Caresse followed him and they were married on a return visit to New York in 1922. Back in France, their wild parties, gambling, drinking, opium experiments, and blatantly open marriage gained them considerable notoriety among the expatriate community. Increasingly committed to writing poetry, Crosby and Caresse also cofounded Black Sun Press. They would publish Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, Crane, and such books as Crosby's own Chariot of the Sun. In Crosby's poetry, he sought to transform the modern wasteland by the power of unconscious revelation, exploiting surrealism, incantation, declamation, and automatic writing. But he also began to craft his own ultimate nihilist performance. On a trip to New York, still married to Caresse, he successfully staged a joint murder and suicide with his willing mistress Josephine Rotch, the Mad Queen of his poetic mythology. He shot her first and then took his own life.
Poems
Published:
1928
Published:
1928
Published:
1928
Biographical Criticism
General Criticism
Other Writing by the Poet
A Typical Harry Crosby Signature as Punctuated with the Black Sun
Crosby's "Sun" in Evolution: Eye? Propeller?
A Signature with Only an Initial and a Sun.
The typescript is an unpublished, uncollected poem (c. 1928-1929) from a group under the collective title "Comme Poems."
Entry from a Very Small Address Notebook
The scrawled lines possibly read: "The office of / the gate of / Heaven / Cemetery / Mistress or Cerebus[?]" These lines reappear as a description of billboards glimpsed from a train on the way to the Harvard-Yale game on the October 24, 1928, diary entry constructed for Shadows of the Sun (Second Series).
The Black Sun as Mark of Approval
Underlining phrases in an essay on an America in which the future is still to be realized, and the past and present are dramatically at odds. This new interest in the contradictions of America emerged in Crosby’s last years. The essay appeared in Transition 14 (Fall 1928).
A Page from Crosby's Working Notebook, Circa 1928
Madhouse
$50 for the use of the word womb
Georgie O’Keefe
cool explosions
passionately chaste
orchidaceous tones
cool and white
singular and opposed to plural
single Rimbaud is single
flower young and strong
her [illegible] roses
white as a wind of diamonds
inner centrality
painting from within out
with all true trivialities
swept magnificently aside
with true simplicity of silence
with the strength of love
no petty schools
no littleness
bear comparison with the
great painters
better flower from Redon
in a woman gives
herself re Stieglitz
A Page from Crosby’s Vest-Pocket Address Notebook, Circa Winter 1928
O’Keefe
a woman
gives
herself
the
Intricate
Gallery
the red fog
(on the side at an angle: Merry Christmas, Dear Miss Ludington. I love you. Harry)
Page 173 of Crosby’s Longhand Notebook in which he has Reconstructed Diary Entries
not care for the Marin watercolors
but just as we were leaving someone
came in the door and the draft
blew a photograph off the
table on the floor and I picked it
up. It was a photograph of a painting
representing a sun back of a
skyscraper and I asked where
the painting was and the next
thing I knew we were looking
ath the most miraculous
paintings ever painted by an
American not even Bellows
excepted – these paintings
by Georgie O’Keefe an Irish woman
from Texas – comparatively unknown
but Christ what paintings
passionately chaste with cool
explosions into things cool
and white an almost hospital
white and there were great
vagina flowers color of
orchids and young roses
flowers young and strong
and magnificently physical
and rich in color and
as simple as silence The
body flower unfolding in
the soul A great painter
singular as opposed to plural
Still Life
Racing Car
Jockey
Toy Horse Against Mill
Mechanical Brain
Reverse Side of "Mechanical Brain"
Though Crosby could bring an edge of whimsy to his photography, it was work that he took seriously. He titled and signed the back of his photos with the same distinctive signature that he applied to his poetry.