Hart Crane: Complete Poems & Selected Letters (LOA #168) (Library of America)

"Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,must lay his heart out for my bed and board."In a short, tumultous life, Hart Crane (1899 -- 1932) wrote two of the greatest books of 20th Century American poetry: White Buildings (1926) and the Bridge (1930) as well as some splendid individual poems. His poetry is collected in this outstanding volume of the Library of America, edited by Langdon Hammer of Yale University.Of the 850 pages of this book, only 144 are devoted to Crane's poetry. Most of the remainder of the text consists of 14 short essays by Crane and of 412 letters from his extensive correspondence written between 1910 and his suicide in 1932. These letters, together with Professor Hammer's notes and biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents, offer the reader a good portrait of Crane's troubled life, and they read with more immediacy and poignancy than any biography.Crane dropped out of high school and left an unhappy home in Cleveland at the age of 17 to try to make his way as a poet in New York. Many of the letters in this collection detail Crane's stormy relationship with his parents, his father Clarence ("C.A.") Crane, a wealthy chocolate manufacturer, and his mother Grace Hart Crane. Crane was also close to his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Belden Hart. In the "Quaker Hill" section of The Bridge, Crane said that the he had to "Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage". His difficult, shifting relationship with his family is amply chronicled in these letters.But this collection includes much more than correspondence with a broken family. They offer insight into Crane's poetic ambitions and into the composition of The Bridge and of the shorter poems. They offer a view of New York City, seen through Crane's eyes, and of his literary friends and contemporaries, including Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Malcolm Cowley, Peggy Cowley, Crane's patron Otto Kahn, and many others. The letters give the reader a portrait of a complex, troubled person who from late adolescence lived life hard and on the edge. Crane was promiscuous with a lengthy series of mostly homosexual affairs together with longer-term relationships with men and women. Crane's most intense male relationship was with a sailor named Emil Opffer (none of his letters to Opffer survive) and, just before his death, he had a passionate heterosexual relationship in Mexico with Peggy Cowley, as she was divorcing Malcolm Cowley. From his mid-20s Crane had deep problems with alcoholism which greatly hindered his ability to write. He was perpetually short of money and cadged and borrowed extensively from his friends and family. He fought constantly and was jailed several times. In a fit of depression -- when his life superficially seemed to be looking up he committed suicide by jumping off a ship, the Orizaba, en route from Cuba to New York City.Read as a whole, this collection of Crane's correspondence and poetry raises difficult and probably unanswerable questions about the relationship between Crane's life and his work. Crane's excesses and passions in fact are an important component of his poetry. But while the life was a failure, Crane was a poet of romantic vision. Crane struggled for years to complete "The Bridge", a work which remains controversial and not unqualifiedly successful. In this poem, Crane took the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol and tried to create a myth, in the machine age, that would unite America's past with its future and also give meaning to his own life. (Much of The Bride is autobiographical.) The Bridge is a work of difficult optimism as Crane traces America back to the voyages of Columbus and the days of Pocahontas with Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe as guides. The poems ends on a note of affirmation and hope, as The Bridge becomes a path to transcendence and to the overcoming of materialism and lifeless routine through love and brotherhood.Crane's short poems are higly concentrated and difficult. The poems I find most rewarding in "White Buildings" include "Voyages" a six-poem sequence detailing an intense love affair and "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" which is a predecessor of "The Bridge." The shorter poems include "At Mellvile's Tomb", the subject of an exchange with Harriet Monroe included in this collection, and "Chaplinesque."One of Crane's masterpieces is his final poem "The Broken Tower" which describes how "I entered the broken world/To trace the visionary company of love, its voice/An instant in the wind." The Broken Tower ends on a note on the redemptive power of love while, soon after completing the poem, Hart Crane would commit suicide.This is a volume that will bring Hart Crane to his readers. The letters chronicle a sad life cut short by excess. But Hart Crane's poetry, brief in amount though it is, has stayed with and inspired me for many years. Hart Crane holds a high place in America's literary heritage. He deserves his place in the Library of America.The quotation at the beginning of this review is from Robert Lowell's sonnet "Words for Hart Crane" in his collection "Life Studies".Robin Friedman

Ottima edizione che raggruppa tutta l'opera di un grandissimo poeta.

"And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice"Hart Crane is one of my favourite poets, and this stanza from 'The Broken Tower' represents his essential ethos. He is difficult, sometimes even appearing to be frustratingly impenetrable, but this difficulty is part of his exaltant beauty. For those who put in the effort to understand him, Crane will repay them with an augmented vision of life. He invites us to follow him in the very first poem of this volume, and tells us to "step/The legend of [our] youth into the noon".'The Bridge' is Crane's epic written in the Romantic tradition, and one can see the influence of Shelley, Whitman and TS Eliot all operating upon his mind. The product of this becomes an astonishing sequence of poems with phenomenal rhetorical power. This collection was finished when Crane was about 30, but he supposed that he would produce his best poetry between the age of 35-40, which means the fact that he jumped to his death in the Caribbean at the young age of 32 was an even bigger tragedy. One is inclined to believe this assertion because of the greatness of his final poem, 'The Broken Tower', but we will have to suffice with what he has left us.That being said, it was surprising to see how little Crane actually wrote. The poetry in this edition (all that Crane ever produced) does not even reach 150 pages, but the sheer power and quality of so much of it more than makes up for this fact. The remaining several hundred pages in this edition provide a very good selection of letters. Just as in the case of Keats, these letters are highly valuable to any person seriously interested in understanding Crane as a poet and person, while also providiing great ideas on poetic theory and life in general. Also included in this edition are a range of notes and helpful biographies, but one laments the omission of any introductory material that could contextualise all of this material and offer one unfamiliar with Crane some tips on reading him. This edition is still a great one to own, due to the amount of Crane one receives. It is also most impressive that the Library of America can fit so much into one book while keeping it so light and small.

Hammer is a teacher at Yale. You can see him stumble through a lecture aimlessly as his lectures are on YouTube. The man was supposed to edit this tome. He certainly is not any help as far as the notes, which are sparse, and I have a suspicion it is due to his lack of knowledge coupled with laziness. The poetry and prose is, of course, superb.

Excelente edición de LOA de uno de los poetas americanos fundamentales.