Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"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 "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
