Hart; Walker EVANS ( photographs ). The Bridge: A Poem.

by CRANE

£11,000 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

The Brooklyn Bridge as Muse CRANE, Hart; Walker EVANS ( photographs ). The Bridge: A Poem. Paris: The Black Sun Press . 1930. 8vo. Original printed wrappers with fold-over flaps, within glassine jacket, printed in red and black and with black woodcut sun to rear wrapper, housed in the publisher’s silver paper-covered slipcase; pp. [100]; printed in red and black, three tipped-in photogravures by Walker Evans with glassine and tissue guards (see below); a few small chips to glassine at spine and extremities (with small loss at foot of spine); subtle repairs to slipcase with some wear to corners and edges; internally fine. First edition, no. 154 of 200 copies on Holland paper, of Crane’s poems using the Brooklyn Bridge as the central symbol of an epic ode to America, accompanied by some of the earliest photographs by Walker Evans and printed at the Black Sun Press, the Parisian English-language publishing house founded in 1927 by American expatriates Harry and Caresse Crosby. Crane (1899–1932) is a singular figure in American poetry, seeking a Whitmanesque voice in the era of high Modernism. The Bridge , his most significant work, constructs an optimistic response to Eliot’s The Waste Land , which he admired greatly but found too bleak, finding hope where Eliot saw only despair. This is sadly ironic given Eliot’s long life and Crane’s suicide at the age of thirty-two (the poet had jumped off the USS Orizaba into the Atlantic en route to New York from Vera Cruz). Particularly vi

• Binding: Hardcover

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