In one of his letters Hart Crane wrote, "Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio," comparing—misspelling and all—the great French poet’s cosmopolitan roots to his own more modest ones in the midwestern United States. Rebelling against the notion that his work should relate to some European school of thought, Crane defiantly asserted his freedom to be himself, a true American writer. John T. Irwin, long a passionate and brilliant critic of Crane, gives readers the first major interpretation of the poet’s work in decades. Irwin aims to show that Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge is the best twentieth-century long poem in English. Irwin convincingly argues that, compared to other long poems of the century, The Bridge is the richest and most wide-ranging in its mythic and historical resonances, the most inventive in its combination of literary and visual structures, the most subtle and compelling in its psychological underpinnings. Irwin brings a wealth of new and varied scholarship to bear on his critical reading of the work—from art history to biography to classical literature to philosophy—revealing The Bridge to be the near-perfect synthesis of American myth and history that Crane intended. Irwin contends that the most successful entryway to Crane’s notoriously difficult shorter poems is through a close reading of The Bridge. Having admirably accomplished this, Irwin analyzes Crane’s poems in White Buildings and his last poem, "The Broken Tower," through the larger context of his epic, showing how Crane, in the best of these, worked out the structures and images that were fully developed in The Bridge. Thoughtful, deliberate, and extraordinarily learned, this is the most complete and careful reading of Crane’s poetry available. Hart Crane may have lived in Cleveland, Ohio, but, as Irwin masterfully shows, his poems stand among the greatest written in the English language.
Featuring a new introduction by Harold Bloom, this volume chronicles the life works of a poet who has suffered much misunderstanding and neglect despite displaying a superb poetic style, idiosyncratic, yet central to American tradition.
Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899.
These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.
No American poet has so swiftly and decisively transformed the course of poetry as Hart Crane. In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the...
Provides insight into five of Hart Crane's most influential works along with a short biography of the poet.
"This volume studies the relation between globalization and inequalities in emerging societies by linking Area and Global Studies, aiming at a new theory of inequality beyond the nation state and beyond Eurocentrism"--
Hart Crane was one of the most important poets of the 20th century. Robert Lowell called him 'the Shelley of my age' and 'the great poet of that generation'. The...
Gale, Cengage Learning. Today: Contemporary American poets who show an interest in jazz in their work include Amiri Baraka, Marvin Bell, Hayden Carruth, Jayne Cortez, Michael S. Harper, Yusef Komunyaaka, and Sonia Sanchez.
Begun in 1923 and published 1930, The Bridge is Crane's major work. "Very roughly," he wrote a friend, "it concerns a mystical synthesis of 'America' . . . The initial...
Hart Crane: the Patterns of His Poetry