Harold Bloom
Crane's poetry has been a touchstone for me, and remains central to a fully imaginative understanding of American literature.


Book Description
This edition features a new introduction by Harold Bloom as a centenary tribute to the visionary of White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930). Hart Crane, prodigiously gifted and tragically doom-eager, was the American peer of Shelley, Rimbaud, and Lorca. Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899, Crane died at sea on April 27, 1932, an apparent suicide. A born poet, totally devoted to his art, Crane suffered his warring parents as well as long periods of a hand-to-mouth existence. He suffered also from his honesty as a homosexual poet and lover during a period in American life unsympathetic to his sexual orientation. Despite much critical misunderstanding and neglect, in his own time and in ours, Crane achieved a superb poetic style, idiosyncratic yet central to American tradition. His visionary epic, The Bridge, is the most ambitious and accomplished long poem since Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Marc Simon's text is accepted as the most authoritative presentation of Hart Crane's work available to us. For this centennial edition, Harold Bloom, who was introduced to poetry by falling in love with Crane's work while still a child, has contributed a new introduction.

ANNOTATION

This is the most complete and authoritative collection of the works of Hart Crane available in paperback.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Despite much critical misunderstanding and neglect, in his own time and in ours, Hart Crane achieved a superb poetic style, idiosyncratic yet central to American tradition. His visionary epic, The Bridge, is the most ambitious and accomplished long poem since Walt Whitman's Song of Myself.

Marc Simon's text is accepted as the most authoritative presentation of Crane's work now available to us.

Harold Bloom's Centenary critical essay is a full-scale analysis of Crane's achievement. Bloom emphasizes Crane's creative agon with T. S. Eliot's work, which Crane could neither evade nor accept.

The introduction also examines the positive relation of Crane's poetic stance to the heroic example of Walt Whitman, Crane's chosen precursor, together with Emily Dickinson. Bloom gives fresh readings of several of the most noted lyrics in White Buildings, including "Voyages II" and "Repose of Rivers."

Defending the unity of The Bridge, Bloom analyzes the "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" and the concluding section, "Atlantis." He also gives particular emphasis to Crane's last great poem, "The Broken Tower."

FROM THE CRITICS

Harold Bloom