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.

Excerpt from The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932 But far more compelling than distance or propriety as the domi nant force behind Crane's prolific composition of letters was an emotional impulse which drove him to discharge so much expres sive energy in a non-poetic form: his acquisitive need for sympathy, pity, understanding, affection a need accompanied by the be lief that these responses could be evoked with a persuasive explana tion in words. Let us not confuse this poignant situation with dis honesty or a huckster's fraudulency. Crane was, after all, a poet to whom language was paramount. The outcome was that even those of his letters which had been intended as geographical bridges, or as duties, speedily found themselves converted into detailed and nu inhibited recitations and exhortations. Examining the letters to his mother in this light, to choose one instance, we can-understand why, despite the profound mutual misunderstanding of which each was aware, Crane persisted in alternately cajoling, threatening, and in forming a basically-unresponsive correspondent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Like Whitman, Hart Crane strove in his poetry to embrace America, to distill an image of America.

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.

This edition features over three hundred letters, selected to best illustrate the complexity and textures of Hart Crane’s turbulent life –– from family pressures, to his creative ambition, to his homosexuality.

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.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1952.