Hart Crane

No poet has so swiftly and decisively transformed the course of American poetry as Hart Crane. This edition is the largest collection of Crane's writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems (including The Bridge) and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane's letters, several that have never before been published. In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called "the broken world." "Crane's voice is daemonic," writes Harold Bloom, "yet his modulation of that sustained rhetorical energy is supreme art, earned through fifteen years of self-revision, tragically ended at thirty-two." Book jacket.