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Hart Crane: Complete Poems & Selected Letters (LOA #168) (Library of America)
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About Hart Crane: Complete Poems & Selected Letters
Product Description 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 ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called “the broken world.” White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane’s masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot’s The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day. This edition is the largest collection of Crane’s writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane’s letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry. His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time. This landmark 850-page volume features a detailed and freshly-researched chronology of Crane’s life as well as extensive explanatory notes, and over fifty biographical sketches of Crane’s correspondents. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Crane's strenuous optimism about America, his barely coded celebrations of homoerotic desire and his bejeweled, dense, late Romantic language made him perhaps the most fiercely cherished of modernists, despite or because of his short, passionate and controversial life: Crane (1899–1932) drowned in the Gulf of Mexico six years after completing his masterful long poem The Bridge. While Crane's best poems have long been widely known, drafts, fragments and apprentice work have been hard to find, and only in 1997 did a fully reliable selection from his voluminous, revealing correspondence appear. Hammer, who assembled that edition, knows more than anyone else alive about Crane; his hefty collection of all the verse, all the published prose (there isn't much) and much of that correspondence (nearly three-quarters of this book) instantly becomes the standard edition. Vigorous, sometimes hyperbolic letters trace Crane's move from Cleveland to New York, his pursuit of the poetic sublime, his interactions with other modernist luminaries (William Carlos Williams, Jean Toomer), his troubles with money, alcohol and family, and his peripatetic last years. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Hart Crane (1899-1932), a pioneer of modernist poetry, is best known for brilliant debut White Buildings (1926) and his 1930 masterpiece, The Bridge.
