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Bezig met laden... The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (Centennial Edition): The Centennial Edition (origineel 2000; editie 2001)door Hart Crane (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkThe Complete Poems of Hart Crane door Hart Crane (2000)
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. This was a surprising collection of poetry by a man besought by his own personal troubles and eventual suicide. The poems are at times lucid, other times evocative of the classics and religious themes. There is a lot of variation and the form was not what I thought it would be upon hearing this book of poetry as a recommendation. Nevertheless, there is something gripping here that stands the test of time- something elusive, phantasmagoric, and daunting. That is the power of this collection and why I enjoyed it. It was challenging and worthwhile. 3.75 stars. I came across the name Hart Crane a while back looking for magazines in which to place my poems. This one lit mag had a typical section on what they were looking for but under what they were not looking for they simply put “Hart Crane. Anything Hart Crane.” Sold me. I decided to look up his wikipedia page and found that he was famous for his long poem, “The Bridge.” I also found out he was inspired by T.S. Eliot and from there I knew I had to give him a try. It’s hard to write intelligently about Hart Crane’s work due to its difficulty. I find myself having a hard time just trying to piece together what he means, so consequently I just pay attention to how the poem hits me, if I like it or not. The introduction by Harold Bloom typifies certain poems as great and other poems as not so great but when I come across those poems I do not find my estimation of them to be the same. Whether his work is dense enough to revisit later and find something new I do not seem to know yet. What I do know is that it doesn’t have the addictive quality of Eliot’s earlier work. With Eliot I found an author who could lay the line down perfectly regardless of whether it was his own or a reference- each line spurred me forward to the next line, and I found myself diving into works that were immersive no matter how short they were. But this is not about T.S. Eliot. This is about Hart Crane, and while I find that much of his poems do have the quality of being “good” I do not find them deeply compelling, interesting, and fun in the same way. Some say that his difficulty shouldn’t detract from a person’s estimation of his work but I believe that if a person is to write poetry that person must connect with the simple as well as the complex. In fact a poet can be simple without being complex, but to be complex without being simple, or at least having that simple core? This is not a thing to be done in my mind. It’s like a trumpet player who completely leaves out the mid range in his solos and melodies. It just presents itself as too off kilter for me to really come away with something after I’ve read. "The Broken Tower" The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell. Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway Antiphonal carillons launched before The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray? The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower; And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score Of broken intervals... And I, their sexton slave! Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain! Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles outleaping - O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!... And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice. My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored Of that tribunal monarch of the air Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word In wounds pledged once to hope, - cleft to despair? The steep encroachments of my blood left me No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower As flings the question true?) - or is it she Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power? - And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes My veins recall and add, revived and sure The angelus of wars my chest evokes: What I hold healed, original now, and pure... And builds, within, a tower that is not stone (Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown In azure circles, widening as they dip The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower... The commodious , tall decorum of that sky Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower. - Hart Crane, 1932 I feel daunted in trying to review Hart Crane's entire oeuvre. He is such an allusive/elusive poet, that I often felt helplessly lost in reading his poetry, especially his magnum opus in praise of Brooklyn Bridge, called simply The Bridge. The title is probably the only thing simple about this dense, immense poem, which is probably the long American poem of the 20th century. Because I feel so daunted by Crane's difficulty, I am only going to give a few personal responses to his work, without trying to analyse the poetry in any depth. I will start of by saying that, although I felt desperately in need of guidance while reading Crane, I also felt a wonderful ebullience and joy while reading his poetry. Crane, although deeply influenced by Walt Whitman's poetics of "free" verse, has a much more classical style than Whitman, incorporating classical metres and rhyme to great effect. Just looking at the above poem, one notices the careful use of a varied iamic pentameter and unobtrusive cross-rhyme, which serves to structure a very obscure poem. Crane was extremely widely read, even though he only lived to the age of 32. Homosexual, or at least bisexual, Crane experienced loneliness and became an alcoholic, finally commiting suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico from the steamship Orizaba while en route to America from a trip to Mexico. What he might still have produced in terms of poetry is something sad to reflect upon. Some have described Crane as "word-drunk", an American Dylan Thomas without the rigour of contemporaries like Eliot and Wallace Stevens. This is false. Crane worked and re-worked his poems incessantly, trying to achieve the perfection of form and content that all good poetry strives after. His poems can seem wordy because he is so concerned with finding the correct expression, the one word that will say as much as a score of imperfect lines. Look again at the above poem, especially the lines "(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip / Of pebbles". The words "jacket" and "slip" are exquisite, chosen with care and precision. "Jacket" means "to enclose or encase in a jacket or other covering", implying the close, tight enclosure of "heaven" in a tower made not of stone. "Slip" has been interpreted in many ways, but the most likely meaning is "a thin, slippery mix of clay and water", refering to the clay from which humanity is fashioned. As you can see, Crane is so careful in choosing his words that it is easy to miss the meaning of a single phrase, not even to mention the meaning of a whole stanza, or the poem itself. This may lead to a lot of frustration when reading Crane; he certainly does not mind being obscure, and rarely gives the reader signposts to his meaning. That said, I hesitate to ascribe fixed meanings to any poem - there are only better and worse reading of poems, not universal or eternal ones. Therefore, my personal response to Crane is more important to me than the disparaging comments of some of his contemporaries (such as Ezra Pound), who either thought he was too classical, or too obscure. I take their criticisms on board, but I do not swallow them whole. Crane is a figure of sadness to me, but also one of brilliance and hope. He produced wonderful poetry in trying circumstances, and left a legacy of verse that will endure. I hope to encourage more people to read his poetry. Even though he may prove difficult, keep faith and try him. As Whitman wrote at the end of his Song of Myself: Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you. So does Crane. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Anchor Books (128) Heeft als studiegids voor studenten
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. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)811.52Literature English (North America) American poetry 20th Century 1900-1945LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. W.W. Norton2 edities van dit boek werden gepubliceerd door W.W. Norton. Edities: 0871401789, 087140656X |
I made the mistake of reading the dreadful Harold Bloom introductory essay first. What a pile of bullshit. It was awful.
I'll give you a taste:
"Crane who suffered forever the curse of sundered parentage, never could settle on a single erotic partner, hence his quest for every sailor in his generation. But I doubt - after reading Paul Mariani, the best of Crane's biographers - that a happy domestic life, and even a steady income, would have saved Crane. No nature could have been less compromising; like a new Byron or Shelley, Crane was a Pilgrim of the Absolute. His quest for agonistic supremacy, against Eliot, to join Whitman, Dickinson, Melville in the American Pantheon. No one can read all of Crane's poetry, across sixty years as I have, [Oh, God] and miss the accents of the Sublime, of the Nietzschean quest for the foremost place.[I'm about gonna die here...] Since Crane is, in his unchurched way, a great religious poet, a Shelleyan myth-maker hymning an Alien God, the tonalities of transcendence [just shoot me] haunt The Bridge and "The Broken Tower," and even the erotic raptures and anguishes of "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" and the "Voyages."
There's another beauty but I can't bring myself to type it up. I can't help myself:
Who or what is such a "Thou" in The Bridge? Hart Crane's kind of negative transcendence represents what ought to be called the American Religion, a gnosis endemic in the United States where, for at least two centuries now, religion has been not the opiate, but the poetry of the people. Crane's actual religious heritage was his mother's Christian Science, which never affected him [Why is all this here then?]. In the spiritual exaltation of "The Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge," as in the spiritual anguish of "The Broken Tower," one can hear a mystical yearning that renders Hart Crane akin to St. John of the Cross, in sensibility though not in faith. Crane's deep attachment to William Blake's poetry, and to Emily Dickinson's, reflects his own stance as an autonomous visionary, distrustful of every creed or ideology, yet questing always for intimations of transcendence. [I just wanna puke...]
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