Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (1944), The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine (1948), The Prophetic Tradition in American Poetry (1968), Melville's Poetry: Toward the Enlarged Heart (1972)
Aaron Kramer (13 December 1921 – 7 April 1997[1]) was an American poet, translator, and social activist.
A lifelong poet of political commitment, he wrote 26 volumes of poetry, three of prose, and ten of translations between 1938 and (published posthumously) 1998. Kramer taught English at Dowling College in Oakdale, Long Island, New York.[2]
Biography
Aaron Kramer was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. (1941) and M.A. (1951) from Brooklyn College and Ph.D. (1966) from New York University.[3]
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.[1] Kramer wrote poems about the Holocaust for four decades. In the 1930s, He started writing poems about the Spanish Civil War and continued throughout most of his life. He also had an interest on writing in and commitment to testify about African American history.[1] 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.[1] 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. .[1] 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 Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).[1] Kramer first gained national prominence with Seven Poets in Search of An Answer (1944) and The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine (1948). His masterpiece is his 26 poems compromising the 1952 sequence “Denmark Vesey", about plans for aborted 1822 slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina.[1]
In addition to poetry, Kramer published collections of translations. These include several works on Heine, Rilke, Yiddish poets, and poems on the Holocaust. Lifelong pen friend Sohail Adeeb (poet, critic, literary editor) translated some of Kramer's works into Urdu.[1]
"From "The Murdered Dreams of Aaron Kramer: A Marxist Poet in the 'American Century'"
The alternatingly celebratory, stoic, and melancholic poetry of Aaron Kramer might be seen, among other ways, as the overlooked and divided love child of Pablo Neruda and Howard Zinn.[4]
Kramer was moved by the support he received by writers around the world who rallied to support him in his stand against McCarthyism.[1]
Kramer started teaching English at Dowling College in 1961, and became a professor there in 1966; after retiring in 1992 he continued to teach as professor emeritus until 1996.[1][5][6]
Private life and death
Kramer married Katherine and had two daughters, Carol and Laura.[2]
He died April 7, 1997, age 75 at his home in Long Island.[2]
Outook
Kramer's artistic identity took shape in New York City during the late 1930s and early 1940s, where he moved in left-wing literary circles and absorbed many of their attitudes and ideals. Although never affiliated with a party or ideology, Kramer consistently pursued progressive political themes in his poetry. He often wrote passionately about the injustices he perceived. Slavery and abolition were frequent themes of his early work ("Denmark Vesey," "The Ballad of August Biondi"). Racism, war and imperialism, and economic inequality were also repeated motifs in his poetry. On the other hand, Kramer frequently wrote about private, personal experiences. Both sides of his work display an idealism and optimism concerning the human capacity for endurance and compassion.[3]
Emma Lazarus: Her Life and Work (Thesis, Brooklyn College, 1951)
The Prophetic Tradition in American Poetry, 1835-1900 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1968)
On Freedom's Side: An Anthology of American Poems of Protest (Macmillan, 1972)
Melville's Poetry: Toward the Enlarged Heart; A Thematic Study of Three Ignored Major Poems (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972)
Neglected Aspects of American Poetry: The Greek Independence War and Other Studies (Oakdale, NY: Dowling College Press, 1997)
Moses: Poems and Translations (New York: O'Hare Books, 1962)
Songs and Ballads: Goethe, Schiller, Heine. Trans. Aaron Kramer (New York: O'Hare Books, 1963)
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Visions of Christ: A Posthumous Cycle of Poems. Ed. Siegfried Mandel. Trans. Aaron Kramer (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1967)
The Last Lullaby: Poetry from the Holocaust. Ed. and trans. Aaron Kramer. Illus. Saul Lishinsky (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998)
Zychlinsky, Rajzel. God Hid His Face. Trans. Barnett Zumoff, Aaron Kramer, Marek Kanter, et al. (Santa Rosa, CA: Word & Quill Press, 1997)
Edited and translated:
A Century of Yiddish Poetry. Ed. and trans. Aaron Kramer (New York: Cornwall Books, 1989)
Teitelboim, Dora. All My Yesterdays Were Steps: The Selected Poems of Dora Teitelboim. Ed. and trans. Aaron Kramer. Illus. Stan Kaplan (Hoboken, NJ: Dora Teitelboim Foundation, 1995)
Editing:
"In later years, Kramer co-edited West Hills Review: a Whitman Journal, and edited or co-edited numerous other anthologies."[3]
^Nelson, Cary. "About Aaron Kramer". Illinois University - Modern American Poetry. Retrieved 3 April 2016.
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Kramer, Aaron (13 April 1945). "The Death of President Roosevelt"(PDF). English 88, Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, Al Filreis, University of Pennsylvania (Fall 2010). Retrieved 3 April 2016.
