Complete poems - Hart Crane

Hart Crane was one of the most important poets of the 20th century. Robert Lowell called him 'the Shelley of my age' and 'the great poet of that generation'. The sensational aspects of Crane's life have tended to obscure the greatness of his poetry. Born in 1899 in a small Ohio town, Crane rebelled against his respectable family, and during the 1920s led a wild, precarious life in Brooklyn, Europe and the Caribbean: asserting his homosexuality, tormented by his fickle genius, depressed, sick, poor and usually drunk. In April 1932 he jumped off a ship and drowned in the sea.But Hart Crane published White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930), two major landmarks in American literature. His great poem 'The Bridge' is a modern epic, a metaphorical fusion of personal feeling with the myths and history of America, and an optimistic reply from the New World to Eliot's Waste Land. When Crane created his new visionary poetry, he found his own American symbols, man-made or untamed, in modern cities of concrete and steel, and in the luxuriant Florida Keys and Caribbean islands.Hart Crane's poetry was unavailable in Britain for many years until the Bloodaxe edition was published in 1984. This new Complete Poems, based on Brom Weber's definitive 1966 edition, has 17 additional poems from the Hart Crane manuscript collection of Columbia University Library. Unfortunately, Bloodaxe's success in selling thousands of copies of this edition persuaded Norton not to renew their sublicence in order that they could distribute their own edition in the UK, but they failed to do that, which meant that Hart Crane's poetry has been mostly unavailable in Britain since the Bloodaxe edition had to be withdrawn.