Maurice Riordan

Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899. In 1923 he became a copy-writer in New York. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926, and in 1930 his most famous work, The Bridge, was published. A reaction against the pessimism in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Bridge was a love song to the myth of America and its optimism a much needed boon to post-Wall Street Crash America. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932. Maurice Riordan has published two collections of poetry, A Word from the Loki (1995) and Floods (2000) - and is co-editor of two anthologies, A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (2001) and Wild Reckoning: an anthology provoked by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (2004). He teaches creative writing at Imperial College London.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their introductions, the selectors offer a passionate and accessible introduction to some of the greatest poets in history.