Hart Crane's 'The Bridge' (English, Hart Crane | Lawrence Kramer)

Product description Review 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 UniversityKramer'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 UniversityNo 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 theMaking of The Bridge About the Author Hart Crane (1899-1932) was one of the preeminent poets of American modernism.Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University. He is the author of fifteen books, as well as editor of two previous annotated editions of poetry: Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition (NYRB, 2015) and Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’: An Annotated Edition (Fordham, 2011).