Hart Crane S Poetry

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.

Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899. In 1923 he became a copy-writer in New York. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926, and in 1930 his most famous work, The Bridge, was published. A reaction against the pessimism in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Bridge was a love song to the myth of America and its optimism a much needed boon to post-Wall Street Crash America. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932.

Crane's first collection of poems, published when he was twenty-seven, displays a prodigious gift already at the height of its powers. This first book of poems by hart Crane, one of his three major collections, was originally published in 1926. The themes in White Buildings are abstract and metaphysical, but Crane's associations and images spring from the American scene. Eugene O'Neill wrote: "Hart Crane's poems are profound and deep-seeking. In them he reveals, with a new insight and unique power, the mystic undertones of beauty which move words to express vision."

One of the leading critics of our time, R.W.B. Lewis, charts the career of Hart Crane's imagination-of his vision, his rhetoric, and his craft. Crane, who has heretofore been assigned a relatively minor place in American letters, emerges from this rich, dense book as one of the finest poets in our language. Mr. Lewis traces the development of the theme which runs through all of Crane’s poetry-the need for the visionary and loving transfiguration of the actual world-and claims that it is this theme which gives Crane’s poetry its extraordinary consistency. Mr. Lewis also relates Crane’s development as poet to the Anglo-American Romantic tradition and argues that Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Emerson are vital to an understanding of Crane’s work. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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 sensational aspects of Crane's life have tended to obscure the greatness of his poetry. Born in 1899 in a small Ohio town, Crane rebelled against his respectable family, and during the 1920s led a wild, precarious life in Brooklyn, Europe and the Caribbean: asserting his homosexuality, tormented by his fickle genius, depressed, sick, poor and usually drunk. In April 1932 he jumped off a ship and drowned in the sea.But Hart Crane published White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930), two major landmarks in American literature. His great poem 'The Bridge' is a modern epic, a metaphorical fusion of personal feeling with the myths and history of America, and an optimistic reply from the New World to Eliot's Waste Land. When Crane created his new visionary poetry, he found his own American symbols, man-made or untamed, in modern cities of concrete and steel, and in the luxuriant Florida Keys and Caribbean islands.Hart Crane's poetry was unavailable in Britain for many years until the Bloodaxe edition was published in 1984. This new Complete Poems, based on Brom Weber's definitive 1966 edition, has 17 additional poems from the Hart Crane manuscript collection of Columbia University Library. Unfortunately, Bloodaxe's success in selling thousands of copies of this edition persuaded Norton not to renew their sublicence in order that they could distribute their own edition in the UK, but they failed to do that, which meant that Hart Crane's poetry has been mostly unavailable in Britain since the Bloodaxe edition had to be withdrawn.

"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"--

Provides insight into five of Hart Crane's most influential works along with a short biography of the poet.