“Hart [Crane], as I later discovered, would have been meditating over that particular poem for months or even years, scribbling lines on pieces of paper that he carried in his pockets and meanwhile waiting for the moment of genuine inspiration when he could put it all together…. Hart tried to charm his inspiration out of its hiding place with a Cuban rumba and a pitcher of hard cider…. He drank in Village speakeasies and Brooklyn waterfront dives; he insulted everyone within hearing or shouted that he was Christopher Marlowe…. By the following afternoon all the outrageous things he had done at night became merely funny, became an epic misadventure to be embroidered—‘And then I began throwing furniture out the window,’ he would say with an enormous chuckle. Everybody would laugh and Hart would pound the table, calling for another bottle of wine. At a certain stage in drunkenness he gave himself and others the illusion of completely painless brilliance; words poured out of him, puns, metaphors, epigrams, visions; but soon the high spirits would be mingled with obsessions—‘See that man staring at us, I think he’s a detective’”

—Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. The website was created by Dustin Kidd for American Studies at the University of Virginia.

“Hart Crane had an infuriating way of writing a poem. Typically, after drinking copiously, he would put a 78 on a hand-cranked Victrola and play it ‘a dozen, two dozen, three dozen times’ while alternately banging away on a typewriter and loudly declaiming the same line of verse repeatedly. To his friends’ horror, the Victrola was indispensable — Crane claimed it gave him ‘intimacy with la Muse’—and he peremptorily refused every polite request to change his habits or at least to confine his cacophonous writing sessions to daylight hours.”

—Brian Reed,
Hart Crane’s Victrola. 
Modernism/Modernity—Volume 7, Number 1, January 2000, pp. 99-125

I’ll admit the websites are a little sketchy; that’s what you get when try to link to actual books from the internet, but the stories were too good to pass up.