Bridge, The

New York: Printed for the Members of The Limited Editions Club, 1981. A Monument of American Poetry"

CRANE, Hart. The Bridge. A Poem... With an Introduction by Malcolm Cowley and Photographs by Richard Benson. New York: Printed for the Members of The Limited Editions Club, 1981.

Limited to 2,000 copies signed by Richard Benson, this being no. 521.

Large quarto (11 15/16 x 9 inches; 304 x 228 mm.). 96 pp. Illustrated with five photographic plates (including one double-page) by Richard Benson.

Publisher's silver-gray Dutch natural-finish cloth, front cover with title stamped in blind, spine lettered in blue, decorative end-papers. A fine copy in the publisher's matching slip-case.

Harold Hart Crane (1899-1932) was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem, in the vein of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. In the years following his suicide at the age of thirty-two, Crane has been hailed by playwrights, poets, and literary critics alike (including Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Bloom), as being one of the most influential poets of his generation.

Richard Benson (born 1943) is a photographer, printer and educator who utilizes photographic processing techniques of the past and present. Benson has a broad range of interests in the photographic print-silver, platinum, palladium, and ink. Working in these different mediums, sometimes learning forgotten crafts and sometimes creating new ones, he has become convinced that ink and the modern photo offset press possess a potential for photographic rendition beyond anything else previously known. In recent years he has been working on the relationship between the computer and traditional photographic imagery, and has been applying the lessons from this in the production of long run offset books of work by different photographers, in both black and white and color.

Limited Editions Club Bibliography, 520.