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.
[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.
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.
[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.
Lifelong pen friend Sohail Adeeb (poet, critic, literary editor) translated some of Kramer's works into Urdu.
[2] 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.