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 Biography
of Aaron Kramer
Poet, translator, and essayist, Aaron Kramer first gained national
prominence with Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (1944) and
The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine (1948). He was a leading
resistance poet throughout the McCarthy era with such texts for music as
Denmark Vesey (1952) and such volumes as Roll the Forbidden
Drums! (1954). In 1958 he collaborated with a dozen artists on The
Tune of the Calliope: Poems and Drawings of New York. Professor of
English at Dowling College, in Oakdale, New York from 1961, and a founding
editor of West Hills Review: A Whitman Journal, he produced such
scholarly works as The Prophetic Tradition in American Poetry
(1968), Melville's Poetry: Toward the Enlarged Heart (1972),
and Neglected Aspects of American Poetry (1997).
Also a noted translator, Kramer produced Rilke: Visions of
Christ (1967); A Century of Yiddish Poetry (1989) which
includes his 370 translations of 135 poets; All My Yesterdays Were
Steps (1995), the selected poems of Dora Teitelboim; and The Last
Lullaby: Poems of the Holocaust (1998). His 1975 translation of Viktor
Ullmann and Peter Kien's opera, The Emperor of Atlantis, which they
created in the Terezin concentration camp, continues in performance
worldwide and is much recorded. Recent collections of his own poetry
include The Burning Bush: Poems and Other Writings (1983),
Indigo (1991), and Regrouping (1997). Volumes of his
selected poetry have been published in Russian and Bulgarian.
Kramer was a popular public reader and radio guest across the United
States, and he recorded for Folkways Records and the Library of Congress.
He pioneered in the therapeutic use of poetry for the disabled, also
contributing many articles to professional journals in the field. The
Second First Art, a Festschrift in his honor, was published in
1996. He received his Ph.D. from New York University.
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