Hart Crane's 'The Bridge' - Annotated (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Hart Crane's long poem The Bridge has steadily grown in stature since it was published in 1930. At first branded a noble failure by a few influential critics- a charge that became conventional wisdom-this panoramic work is now widely regarded as one of the finest achievements of twentieth-century American poetry. It unites mythology and modernity as a means of coming to terms with the promises, both kept and broken, of American experience.

Review Quotes

No great poem is more deceptively titled than The Bridge, a work
whose restless dynamics exceed all architectural containment. Hart
Crane set out to celebrate America but what he produced was a rhapsody
to New York City, conceived as a fount of immense power and ideal
perch for assessing national values in a "Jazz Age." And now, under
Lawrence Kramer's capacious annotation, The Bridge expands into its
fullest dimensions, becoming historical fantasia, dream-text,
combative retort, personal document, national epic, queer libretto,
and machine-age homage. Frank O'Hara's claim that Crane's writing is
"better than the movies" is exuberantly realized in Kramer's detailed
dramaturgy.

-----Edward Brunner, author of Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge

Hart Crane's The Bridge is generally agreed to be one of the great long poems of the early twentieth-century, but its obscure allusions and habitual double entendres have made it a difficult poem to digest. Lawrence Kramer's excellent annotated edition, produced with the help of a devoted group of graduate students, thus fills what is a real lacuna. Not only are Kramer's annotations deeply learned and precise; they also display great tact and common sense, refusing to overwhelm us with data or tangential matter. No student of Hart Crane--indeed no lover of Modernist poetry--will want to be without this necessary edition of The Bridge.-----Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita, Stanford University

Kramer's edition will be an unqualified boon to anyone who wants to introduce students to Crane. And that is because students themselves have had a hand in producing the superb annotations here. Thanks to this version, the difficulty of reading The Bridge will no longer be an obstacle to teaching and studying Crane's great poem.-----Robert L. Caserio, The Pennsylvania State University

About the Author

Hart Crane (1899-1932) was one of the preeminent poets of American modernism.