This edition features a new introduction by Harold Bloom as a centenary
tribute to the visionary of White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge
(1930). Hart Crane, prodigiously gifted and tragically doom-eager, was
the American peer of Shelley, Rimbaud, and Lorca. Born in Garrettsville,
Ohio, on July 21, 1899, Crane died at sea on April 27, 1932, an apparent
suicide. A born poet, totally devoted to his art, Crane suffered his
warring parents as well as long periods of a hand-to-mouth existence. He
suffered also from his honesty as a homosexual poet and lover during a
period in American life unsympathetic to his sexual orientation. Despite
much critical misunderstanding and neglect, in his own time and in ours,
Crane achieved a superb poetic style, idiosyncratic yet central to
American tradition. His visionary epic, The Bridge, is the most
ambitious and accomplished long poem since Walt Whitman's Song of
Myself. Marc Simon's text is accepted as the most authoritative
presentation of Hart Crane's work available to us. For this centennial
edition, Harold Bloom, who was introduced to poetry by falling in love
with Crane's work while still a child, has contributed a new
introduction.