Found this deliciously ironic blurb on the back of Faber's Poet-to-Poet Series edition of Hart Crane's poetry selected by Maurice Riordan:
Harold Hart Crane was born in 1899. He spent much of his life in New York City, where he worked irregularly as a copywriter. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926 and his most famous work, The Bridge, in 1930. A reaction against the pessimism in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, it is a love song to the myth of America and its optimism encapsulates the excitement and energy of the Jazz Age. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932.
4 comments:
Oh dear, I feel a bit bad for laughing at this!
I feel a bit the Sorlil does, though I have to say the blurb is brilliantly done.
Well-written, yes, but one does have to hope the blurb-writer was aware of the inherent irony. Surely that must be so. One hopes ...
I love Crane. A small amount of it's tripe, but several poems are just astonishingly good:
'Yes, tall, inseparably our days
Pass sunward. We have walked the kindled skies
Inexorable and girded with your praise,
By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise.'
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