Aaron Kramer: Difference between revisions

Kramer wrote his first protest poems in the mid-1930s when he was barely a teenager, through his pointed critiques of the 1983 war in [[Grenada]] and [[Ronald Reagan]]'s 1985 visits to [[Nazi]] graves in [[Bitburg]]. .<ref name=aaron/> Kramer wrote poems about the [[Holocaust]] for four decades. In the 1930s, He started writing poems about the [[Spanish American War]] and it continued through most of his life. He also had an interest on writing in and commitment to testify about [[African American history]]. .<ref name=aaron/> His first poems about exploited labor appeared in 1934 and his last were published in 1995. Kramer’s 1937 poem “The Shoe-Shine Boy” published when he was only fifteen years old.<ref name=aaron/> He adopted traditional meters—favoring iambic trimeters, tetrameters, and pentameter—in part to install a radical politics within inherited rhythms. His earliest poems about the suppression of freedoms in the United States date from 1938 and continued writing them through the 1980s. Kramer wrote his first [[pamphlet]] in 1938 titled [[The Alarm Clock]], it was funded by a local Communist Party chapter. .<ref name=aaron/> Kramer also produced [[translations]] of [[“Rilke: Visions of Christ”]] and [[“Der Kaiser von Atlantis”]], the [[opera]] composed by [[Viktor Ullmann]] in the [[Theresienstadt concentration camp]] in 1943. Kramer was one of the few [[American writers]] to produce one a series of poems about [[McCarthyism]], from satiric "[[The Soul of Martin Dies]]" (1944) to "[[Called In]]" (1980), his poem of outrage against those compelled to testify before the [[House of Unamerican Activities Committee]].<ref name=aaron/> Aaron Kramer first gained [[Nation|national]] prominence with [[Seven Poets in Search of An Answer]] (1944) and [[The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine]] (1948). His master piece is his 26 poems compromising the 1952 sequence [[“Denmark Vesey"]], which is about plans for aborted 1822 slave revolt in [[Charleston, South Carolina]].<ref name=aaron/> In addition to his poetry, Kramer published a number of collections of translations, which includes several of his works form volumes of Heine, Rilke, Yiddish Poetry, and his poems about the [[Holocaust]]. His critical books include [[The Prophetic Tradition in American Poetry]] which was published in 1968 and [[Melville’s Poetry]] which was published in 1972.<ref name=aaron/> Kramer collaborated with a group of artists on [[“The Tune of the Calliope: Poems and Drawings of New York”]] and was editor of the 1972 anthology [[“On Freedom’s Side: American Poems of Protest”]].<ref name=aaron/> He wanted to radicalize root and branch ourthe literallyAmerican literary tradition, not abandon it for alternative forms. He translated and edited the work 135 Yiddish poets were published as part of [[“A Century of Yiddish Poetry”]]. Kramer had a variety of different jobs until obtaining a position teaching English that would later become Downing College.<ref name=aaron/>