Sunday, September 21, 2008

On the Delicate Art of Blurb Writing


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:

Marion McCready said...

Oh dear, I feel a bit bad for laughing at this!

Dave King said...

I feel a bit the Sorlil does, though I have to say the blurb is brilliantly done.

Jane Holland said...

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 ...

Bo said...

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.'