"Hart Crane. The Bridge" / Frasconi, 59. | Library of Congress "Hart Crane. The Bridge" / Frasconi, 59. [ digital file from b&w film copy neg. ] Full online access to this resource is only available at the Library of Congress. About this Item "Hart Crane. The Bridge" / Frasconi, 59. Summary Print shows a view of the Brooklyn Bridge above an excerpt from the poem by Hart Crane. Contributor Names - Brooklyn Bridge (New York, N.Y.)--1950-1960 Format Headings - Title and other information from Beall. - Edition 4/15. - Signed and dated in pencil. - Not in Cleveland. - American prints in the Library of Congress : a catalog of the collection / compiled by Karen F. Beall... Baltimore : John Hopkins Press, 1970, p. 157. - Purchase; Pennell fund. 1 print : woodcut, color ; 69 x 39.5 cm. Call Number/Physical Location FP - XX - F837, no.

29 (D size) [P&P] Repository Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA Digital Id Library of Congress Control Number 2003664483 LC-USZ62-137279 (b&w film copy neg.) Rights Advisory Rights status not evaluated. For general information see "Copyright and Other Restrictions..." ( ) Online Format Rights & Access Rights assessment is your responsibility. The Library of Congress does not own rights to material in its collections. Therefore, it does not license or charge permission fees for use of such material and cannot grant or deny permission to publish or otherwise distribute the material. Ultimately, it is the researcher's obligation to assess copyright or other use restrictions and obtain permission from third parties when necessary before publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in the Library's collections. For information about reproducing, publishing, and citing material from this collection, as well as access to the original items, see: Fine Print Collection - Rights and Restrictions Information For guidance about compiling full citations consult Citing Primary Sources . Rights Advisory: Rights status not evaluated.

For general information see "Copyright and Other Restrictions..." ( ) Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-137279 (b&w film copy neg.) Call Number: FP - XX - F837, no. 29 (D size) [P&P] Access Advisory: --- Obtaining Copies If an image is displaying, you can download it yourself. (Some images display only as thumbnails outside the Library of Congress because of rights considerations, but you have access to larger size images on site.) Alternatively, you can purchase copies of various types through Library of Congress Duplication Services . If a digital image is displaying: The qualities of the digital image partially depend on whether it was made from the original or an intermediate such as a copy negative or transparency. If the Reproduction Number field above includes a reproduction number that starts with LC-DIG..., then there is a digital image that was made directly from the original and is of sufficient resolution for most publication purposes. If there is information listed in the Reproduction Number field above: You can use the reproduction number to purchase a copy from Duplication Services. It will be made from the source listed in the parentheses after the number.

If only black-and-white ("b&w") sources are listed and you desire a copy showing color or tint (assuming the original has any), you can generally purchase a quality copy of the original in color by citing the Call Number listed above and including the catalog record ("About This Item") with your request. If there is no information listed in the Reproduction Number field above: You can generally purchase a quality copy through Duplication Services. Cite the Call Number listed above and include the catalog record ("About This Item") with your request. Price lists, contact information, and order forms are available on the Duplication Services Web site . Access to Originals Please use the following steps to determine whether you need to fill out a call slip in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room to view the original item(s). In some cases, a surrogate (substitute image) is available, often in the form of a digital image, a copy print, or microfilm. Is the item digitized? (A thumbnail (small) image will be visible on the left.) Yes, the item is digitized. Please use the digital image in preference to requesting the original. All images can be viewed at a large size when you are in any reading room at the Library of Congress.

In some cases, only thumbnail (small) images are available when you are outside the Library of Congress because the item is rights restricted or has not been evaluated for rights restrictions. As a preservation measure, we generally do not serve an original item when a digital image is available. If you have a compelling reason to see the original, consult with a reference librarian. (Sometimes, the original is simply too fragile to serve. For example, glass and film photographic negatives are particularly subject to damage. They are also easier to see online where they are presented as positive images.) No, the item is not digitized. Please go to #2. Do the Access Advisory or Call Number fields above indicate that a non-digital surrogate exists, such as microfilm or copy prints? Yes, another surrogate exists. Reference staff can direct you to this surrogate. No, another surrogate does not exist. Please go to #3. If you do not see a thumbnail image or a reference to another surrogate, please fill out a call slip in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room. In many cases, the originals can be served in a few minutes. Other materials require appointments for later the same day or in the future.

Reference staff can advise you in both how to fill out a call slip and when the item can be served. To contact Reference staff in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room, please use our Ask A Librarian service or call the reading room between 8:30 and 5:00 at 202-707-6394, and Press 3. Citations are generated automatically from bibliographic data as a convenience, and may not be complete or accurate. Chicago citation style: Hart Crane: 'The Bridge' & Influence on Modernist Poetry - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com Hart Crane: 'The Bridge' & Influence on Modernist Poetry Watch short & fun videos Start Your Free Trial Today An error occurred trying to load this video. Try refreshing the page, or contact customer support. You must create an account to continue watching Register for a free trial Are you a student or a teacher? I am a student Start Your Free Trial To Continue Watching As a member, you'll also get unlimited access to over lessons in math, English, science, history, and more. Plus, get practice tests, quizzes, and personalized coaching to help you succeed.

Coming up next: Robert Frost Poetry Analysis: The Road Not Taken and Other Poems You're on a roll. Keep up the good work! Your next lesson will play in 10 seconds 0:06 Hart Crane 1:51 Style in 'The Bridge' 2:39 Content of 'The Bridge' 3:29 Response to 'The Waste Land' 5:01 Lesson Summary Add to Add to Add to Want to watch this again later? Log in or sign up to add this lesson to a Custom Course. Custom Courses are courses that you create from Study.com lessons. Use them just like other courses to track progress, access quizzes and exams, and share content. Teachers Organize and share selected lessons with your class. Make planning easier by creating your own custom course. Students Create a new course from any lesson page or your dashboard. From any lesson page: Click "Add to" located below the video player and follow the prompts to name your course and save your lesson. From your dashboard: Click on the "Custom Courses" tab, then click "Create course". Next, go to any lesson page and begin adding lessons. Edit your Custom Course directly from your dashboard.

Personalize: Name your Custom Course and add an optional description or learning objective. Organize: Create chapters to group lesson within your course. Remove and reorder chapters and lessons at any time. Share your Custom Course or assign lessons and chapters. Teacher Edition: Share or assign lessons and chapters by clicking the "Teacher" tab on the lesson or chapter page you want to assign. Students' quiz scores and video views will be trackable in your "Teacher" tab. Premium Edition: You can share your Custom Course by copying and pasting the course URL. Only Study.com members will be able to access the entire course. Create an account to start this course today Try it free for 5 days! Lesson Transcript Instructor: Natalie Boyd Natalie is a teacher and holds an MA in English Education and is in progress on her PhD in psychology. Hart Crane's poem 'The Bridge' changed poetry by showing how modernist forms could be used to express uplifting ideas. In this lesson, you will learn about Crane's influence on modernist poetry as well as 'The Bridge,' and then you'll test your knowledge with a quiz. Hart Crane Hart Crane was an influential modernist poet. Modernist poets abandoned traditional forms and themes.

Instead, they often wrote without rhyme or meter; they used imagery related to cities instead of the country, and they took a more pessimistic view of life than the Romantic poets that came before them. Like many of his contemporaries, Hart Crane abandoned traditional forms of poetry and experimented with rhyme and meter. And like other Modernist poets, Crane focused on imagery that related to society and cities instead of nature. This Modernist focus on society that Crane and his friends were involved in made sense in the context of the time period. At the time, the Industrial Revolution meant that new technology was making life very different from the farmers' lives that were most common before the 20th century. In addition, cities were growing larger as more people moved from small towns to urban areas. So naturally, the poets writing at the time used imagery and ideas from these modern locations. Because of the problems that faced people who lived in cities, such as crime, pollution, and overcrowding, the Modernist poets took on a negative view of the world. To them, the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution meant that the world was becoming a bad place. But Hart Crane took a different view.

Though Crane himself suffered from depression as he struggled to make ends meet in New York City, he thought that the advances in society were good. He saw hope as an important part of literature, and his poems took on the more optimistic view of traditional poetry. So, he is often referred to as a Modernist Romantic; that is, his style was Modernist, but his optimistic view was Romantic. Style in The Bridge Crane's most famous work is a book-length series of poems called The Bridge. The Bridge consists of fifteen poems that together make up a long poem. When Crane wrote it, most poetry was either very long poetry, often called epic poetry , or it was shorter poetry that was often gathered together into collections. One type of shorter poetry is lyric poetry. What made The Bridge unique was that the fifteen lyric poems also banded together to make one long epic poem. Even today, over seventy years after it was first published, many critics argue over whether it should be categorized as epic or lyric! In general, though, it's best to think of it as a new, hybrid type of poetry that's both epic and lyric. Crane used the bridge to symbolize how advances in society could bring people together.

Content of The Bridge The Bridge is about modern society. The title refers to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, where Crane wrote the poem. The Brooklyn Bridge is a symbol in the poem. It's a manmade structure, and at the time that Crane was writing, it was a relatively new structure. Other poets of the time saw manmade objects as representative of the downfall of society. To them, the technology of the day (bridges, telephones, cars, and other new breakthroughs) was breaking society apart and causing a rift between people. But Crane uses the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol for what manmade things can do: bring together - or bridge - the fractured aspects of society. Even as other poets wrote about how society's advances were tearing people apart, Crane points out that the same innovations could bring people together. A Response to The Waste Land Though The Bridge was published in 1930, Hart Crane actually began writing it in 1923. A year earlier, the most famous Modernist poet, T.S. Eliot, published an epic poem called The Waste Land. The Waste Land is considered to be one of the most influential poems of the entire 20th century and for good reason.

In it, Eliot attacks modern society and shows the darkest parts of humankind: war, rape, barrenness, and death are all touched upon in the poem. Life in the 20th century is likened to life in a wasteland. × Dividing The Idiom: An Analysis of Hart-Crane’s The Bridge | Drafts and final drafts Drafts and final drafts Essays I've Written and Forgotten About Dividing The Idiom: An Analysis of Hart-Crane’s The Bridge by Donald Strickley Quickly skimming Harold Hart Crane’s ode To The Brooklyn Bridge will yield little, if any, information. The poem seems simultaneously choppy and meandering, a strange maze of misplaced words that changes subject and setting nearly every line. It doesn’t, when read out loud, sound particularly melodic, and the craftsmanship isn’t obvious. Once inspected, though, an endless amount of depth becomes evident. All but one of the lines, for instance, have exactly ten syllables (with some arguable dipthongs) and the one longer line—“Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars” provides what I see as two of the most revealing and beautiful metaphors in the poem.

The rhythm itself doesn’t offer any particularly significant-seeming patterns. Hart Crane uses a typical-of-the-time Iambic pentameter that is full of irregularities which don’t seem to align with any particular pattern. It is interesting to note, however, that the feet ending most of the lines tend to reassume regular meter, though I can’t guess at the intent of this. Punctuated caesuras are spread throughout the poem, with nearly every type of punctuation being represented. They accomplish a variety of rhythmic and rhetorical purposes and add to the piece’s distinctiveness. Some of them are used to emphasize shifts in action, like the dash delineating the seagull’s hover and swoop between the first and second stanzas. Semicolons are used frequently and confusingly. Some separate ideas that are different but very much entwined, and still others separate stanzas.

Ellipses also make several appearances, usually separating ideas where the idea being led into is rather calming and periods tend to underline where a cap is being put on a summative idea: “all afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn…/ Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.” Hart Crane occasionally doubles up on punctuation, which plays on distinctions so minute that their effect is far more evident than explainable. The rhyme scheme offers some interesting quirks, but it’s not very clear if these were considered significant or even intended by the author. Sounds do not repeat themselves often enough to be noticeable or do any work by themselves, and actual rhymes are infrequent. The first instance of rhyme appears in the second stanza, with line three’s “away” rhyming with the next’s “day.” This seems somewhat coincidental, but the others instances are almost definitely purposeful: the final two stanzas have end rhymes in their second and fourth lines, each perfectly masculine.

It’s almost as if Hart Crane began the writing (or feeling) the poem with the purpose of maximizing his intent with plain language instead of floweriness but became so swept up in the deep undercurrents of emotion that occur as the poem shifts away from third-person angles towards Hart Crane’s “own” thoughts instead, and he can’t help but drift towards the classicism of rhyme schemes. The contrast between “sod” and “God” is also nice. Enjambment occupies a peculiar role here. Hart Crane cuts off lines with great effect across the piece, creating confusion and insight in his wake. Where many poets use enjambment to draw attention to a particular idea or phrase, Hart Crane uses it to blend (or blur) his lines. This is perhaps most maddeningly exemplified by the second line of the second stanza: “Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes/ As apparitional as sails that cross/ some page of figures to be filed away/ –Till elevators drop us from our day…” The stanza leading into this describes, in so many words, the flight of a seagull waking up from the bridge.

This ‘angle’ persists, while the third and fourth evoke images of office drones, but it is astoundingly unclear to which of these two settings the second line lends itself because of its abrupt enjambment, and it ends up belonging to neither, instead serving as a purely “neutral” transitional line that manages to connect the two vastly different ideas. The rhythm and sound of Hart Crane’s syllables and letters play distant fiddles to his words. Hart Crane is a controversial figure in poetry because he seems to dance the fine line between untouched depth of meaning and very fancy nonsense, although I’ll argue that, at least in this poem, his feet are firmly on the former side, however much he waves his arms on the other side. Brooklyn Bridge is teeming with strange wordplay, nearly each word asking to be looked at closely. The poem is a labyrinth of hyperbaton, ellange, and other grammatical tropes, keeping the reader constantly off balance as verbs trade subjects like one of those holographic pictures that changes depending upon which angle you look at it.

There are, of course, the obvious tropes, such as the metaphor he uses to so casually to connect the bridge with hugely constructive images, like “O harp and altar of the fury fused,” which also has a nice metalepsis in “fury” (fury to work to workers) and is followed by an equally notable parenthesis: “(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)” In just those twenty syllables Hart Crane evokes the church, music, metallurgy, and still manages to enclose yet another idea in punctuation that, more clearly than any other part of the poem let us know that he is not just chronicling this beauty; he too is overwhelmed. While there are these and many more examples of easily-identifiable tropes, much more often the power of the language is achieved not by any particular trope, as tropes require defined and repeatable parameters, but through some indescribable manipulation of our language centers [1] .

As Arthur Quinn puts it when describing the difference between periphresis and pleonasm, “we need more than a blue pencil to retrieve the literal meaning.”(Quinn 64) In the next stanza, Hart Crane distills this rhetorical mastery into a single word. “I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights.” “Sleights” can be categorized both as catechresis and pun, but this would greatly undervalue the work that it does. It is a pun in that it exploits the phonic similarity to both ‘heights’ and ‘sights,’ two words that would make sense in context and are meant to be evoked. It is not a perfect pun, however, as it does not so shed light on the connection between the chosen and implied word, instead monumentally shifting and confusing the line’s reading. Not all of Hart Crane’s catachreses are as cryptic, however.

Take, for instance, the cinematic journey of the fifth stanza’s suicidal “bedlamite.” After climbing to the “parapets” of the bridge, he pauses “momently” before “A jest falls from the speechless caravan.” Hart Crane springs “jest” as suddenly as “sleights,” but the poem has provided enough context so that we can fairly safely assume that he’s referring to the “bedlamite”. This is only catachresis, but again, so much work is done by it. A dark humor is evoked instantly, as the reader is forced to think of the man as, literally, a joke, but, just as instantly (though perhaps on a deeper level of consciousness) evokes, through apocope, “jester,” suggesting that flinging himself from the “speechless caravan” is a joke he is playing on the city, on us. This line also emphasizes another of Hart Crane’s ill-defined tools, the catachrestic metaphor. It helps that the positioning of “speechless caravan” means it is probably the bridge, but it’s why—a bridge is in a sense a collection of vehicles, and it never talks—that gives it untold depths of meaning.

The same goes for the bridge as an “unfractioned idiom” in the ninth paragraph. The impact of equating the bridge to something that you recognize and feel connected to without fully understanding, and that can’t be divided or simplified, is absolutely immense. Being able to convey such depths of connection begins not with rhetorical prowess but with a connection that is actually that deep, and this is what allows Hart Crane to make To Brooklyn Bridge so significant. It is an ode to the relationship between the bridge, the city, Hart Crane, and (through Hart Crane), the individual. There is a constant struggle with being an individual in any city, especially one that’s arguably the world capital of individuality.

The ability, however, to get lost in a sea of faces can be a welcome respite, and Hart Crane observes, in the seventh stanza, how the bridge’s uncaring objectivity in its job reflects this: “of anonymity time cannot raise: vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.” As one of the anonymous faces, Hart Crane observes the Bridge from a constantly shifting time and viewpoint, starting from the top of both the bridge and the morning with the seagull, moving slowly down to street level by noon, and finally ending up underneath the bridge at night. His rhetorical focus shifts over time as well, moving from broad and all-encompassing to incisive and impossibly deep while retaining a constant horsepower. These similar yet vastly different perspectives show us the myriad of ways the city looks out over the city and, obviously, vice versa. The bridge occupies an ironclad place in both our physical and figurative realities, simultaneously connecting communities and cultures and places and people and ideas both in the individual and the whole. Hart Crane, though a man who by all accounts spent most of his time alive without strong or reliable connections, found a deeply meaningful entity in the Brooklyn Bridge.

If poetry is photography of ideas and a photo is worth a thousand words, Hart Crane’s work is comparable to Chuck Close, his creation an enormous collection of small yet intricate individual images that comprise, upon zooming out, a breathtaking, existentialism-inducing monument. [1] The only comparison that seems at all adequate is to a sentence containing words that have had the letters between the first and last jumbled. Our brain, through a trick developed by evolution for some unknown reason, can almost effortlessly read this sentence, despite it being literally gibberish. Hart Crane Biographical Sketch Hart Crane: Biographical Sketch Harold Hart Crane ("Hart" was his mothers maiden name) was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, near Cleveland in 1899 and committed suicide by leaping from the deck of the S. S. Orizaba somewhere off the Florida coast just before noon on April 26, 1932. His education was informal. He never completed his final year of high school, but at the age of 17 persuaded his recently-divorced parents to let him live in New York City to prepare for college.

From 1917 to 1924, he shifted back and forth between Cleveland and New York, briefly working in Cleveland as a cub reporter, but more often as a menial in his fathers candy factory, and in New York as a copywriter for mail order catalogues and advertising agencies. He lived an unsettled life, in and out of apartments and rooms in New York City, and in southern Connecticut sharing farmhouses with friends. Most of the poems in The Bridge  many of them depicting New York City with a vibrancy that was rare in poetry  were written on the Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba where his family owned a vacation cottage. When he found himself unable to complete The Bridge, he sought inspiration by traveling to Europe, and when he was awarded a Guggenheim in 1931, he temporarily settled in Mexico. Crane was sensitive to the problem of uprootedness. This became a subject in his own poetry: the history in his American epic centers primarily on various technological breakthroughs  clipper ship, train, subway, airplane  that, he might have said, create an illusion of conquering space by speeding up the consumption of time.

But the issue was more personal; it stemmed from his position as a gay male in a culture that was largely homophobic. He understood that he was a homosexual after an affair in 1919 in Akron, Ohio, where he was employed as a clerk in one of his fathers candy stores. In the spring of 1924, he met Emil Opffer, a ships purser. With him, an emotional relationship developed in which Crane was intensely engaged. (The six poems entitled Voyages were fashioned as an extraordinary souvenir of their temporary union.) Crane never found a single partner with whom to share his life, and after Opffer, he may have felt such a partner could never be found. His affairs were temporary, mostly anonymous, and sometimes violent; he apparently never sought out sexual companionship among members of the New York artistic community. Late in his brief life, when living in Mexico in 1931 and 1932, he entered into a heterosexual liaison with Peggy Baird, the former wife of a close friend, Malcolm Cowley. With her, there had been discussion of marriage and a new beginning.

All in all, Crane lived a tumultuous life, a life reflected in what one critic disparagingly called his "Rube Goldberg rhetoric." Maturing in a time when an astonishing range of poetic styles were competing with each other for ascendancy, Crane as an apprentice poet seems to have sampled one and all. The early poems that open his first collection, White Buildings (1926), are a veritable taxonomy of the options open to a young poet eager to learn to write in a modern style. There is the Eliotic ennui of "Modern Craft," and the sumptuous imagism of "October-November." Gusto of a Poundian sort breaks out from the solemn quatrains of "Praise for an Urn" and the children in "Poster" (the opening of "Voyages I") step out of a Wallace Stevens seascape. Unpublished poems from the same time expose imitations of E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams. Crane forged his own unbelievably idiosyncratic style out of an impossible melange of influences, making the very negotiation of potentially-divisive conflicting registers the astonishing tightrope-walk of the poem. According to Lincoln Kirstein, E. E.

Cummings claimed that "Cranes mind was no bigger than a pin, but it didnt matter; he was a born poet." Cranes mature poetry was written over a meteorically-brief period, from the spring of 1924 until the fall of 1926, and it was intensely performative. If it was short on intellectual conception, it was long on linguistic feats that sought to duplicate an experience as it was unfolding. If Crane had attempted only to be celebratory, he would have endured, perhaps, as a minor poet, an American Swinburne. But Crane also came of age at a time when poets found themselves thinking as critics, extending the range of their own poetry to include "unpoetic" analytical meditations. Some of his closest friends were the young men who would go on to invent the new criticism  Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Kenneth Burke  all of whom saw themselves, in those early years of their lives, first as poets.

Cranes letters are filled with remarkably astute observations about what might be possible in the future for poetry, and in an exchange with Harriet Monroe, he mounted a strong defense of one of his own works, "At Melvilles Tomb," detailing what he called a "logic of metaphor" that was unfolding within and below the poems linguistic surface, as a product of the interplay of the connotations of words. Few other poets, in 1925, could have been so eloquent about what they hoped to achieve. In his mature style, in works such as Voyages, "The Wine Menagerie," "O Carib Isle!," and (from The Bridge) "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge," "The Harbor Dawn," "Cutty Sark," and "The Tunnel," Crane masterfully uses variations in rhythm and syntax to establish a powerful, nearly invisible foundation that provides a dynamic forward movement to a poetic line that is bristling with significance, its diction drawn from virtually dozens of conflicting and overlapping registers.

Like other young poets, Crane admired what Eliot had achieved by broadening the scope of what could be treated within a poem, but he deplored what he saw as Eliots pessimism. Soon after "The Waste Land" appeared in 1922, Crane wrote his own response, the na�ve and jejune "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" (1923). Something more was needed, and Crane embarked on a plan to write an extended poem, a symphonic epic, that would be a "mystic synthesis of America." Eliot took a stand against the present, it seemed to Crane. By contrast, Cranes poem would properly evaluate the machine, locating a place for it in the present, judging both its good and bad elements. But the poem stalled. Crane had written its final section, a celebration of the exalted feelings the poet was experiencing as he looked over the modern city and found it transformed by the sensational new descriptions that had emanated from his poems  none of which, with the exception of this congratulatory finale, he had yet conceived how to write.

Meanwhile, as he pondered how to write the individual sections that would justify his optimistic finale, Crane worked through shorter pieces, occasioned by incidents in his life, each of which took him further toward creating a style that aimed to synthesize with accuracy unusually complex states of thought. In his 1947 preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson expressed regret at not focusing more attention on the last "type," "the poetry of straightforward mental conflict": "I had not read Hart Crane when I published the book, and I had had the chance to do so." As Empson suggests, Crane tracked with a completeness heretofore inconceivable even minute gradations in experience, both intellectual and emotional at once. In "The Wine Menagerie," he is capable of registering a simultaneous pull toward and resistance to a particular event. Voyages ends in a bittersweet valedictory that both offers and resists closure, that understands that a love affair is over even as it affirms the affair will never be forgotten.

As Crane postponed work on his epic poem and composed these new lyrics, rather than resolving his problems with The Bridge he only exacerbated them: the new technical achievement he was developing outstripped his plans for what he thought to include in the subject-matter in his epic of America. When a loan from the financier Otto Kahn (whose own son, Roger Wolfe Kahn, had achieved his fame by leading one of the most successful dance bands of the 1920s) freed Crane to work entirely on his long poem, nothing in the rather conventional outline he had developed spurred him on to write. In his 1925 autobiographical poem "Passage" the speaker at one point returned to a territory (that may have represented an earlier point in his life) only to find the site almost unrecognizably overtaken with wildly proliferating growth. Something similar must have seemed to be happening to him when he turned back to The Bridge. To write the lyrics of emotional and intellectual intensity of 1924 and 1925, he had developed an approach that so completely outstripped his plans for the American epic that, in effect, he had superseded his work before he had been able to get it underway.

Crane set out to write a chronological exploration of America in which the poem opened with Columbus, proceeded to the crisis of the Civil War, and brought us to the present with the example of the subway. This was the burdensome plot that failed to ignite his interest in the winter and spring of 1926. That structure remains obscurely in place in the final work, but it is almost certainly the least important aspect of the poem. What allowed Crane to begin The Bridge was a complete change of scene, a shift to the Isle of Pines in the Caribbean. Left to himself, Crane at first lapsed into melancholy and despair. To cultural critic Waldo Frank, one of a number of father-surrogates to whom Crane looked for guidance and whom he used to construct points of stability in his life, he wrote an eloquent explanation of why The Bridge was no longer possible to write (see his June 20, 1926, letter). Few poets have exposed the prospects of the modern epic to so withering a critique.

But having thoroughly internalized all the reasons why a modern epic is impossible, Crane shortly thereafter began to write, with a fluency that was entirely new to him, the poems that would together make up more than two-thirds of The Bridge. Like his earlier lyrics, they rise out of a divided state of mind. By understanding the unlikelihood of his project, Crane (no doubt inadvertantly) constructed a basis upon which to begin it: the very point of the poem was that it was needed, that it did not yet exist, that it was to be sought for, an act of postulation. The Promenade over the Brooklyn Bridge, New York, opened 1883. John and Washington Roebling. Corbis-Bettmann, photo c. 1925. Geography further impinges on these poems. On the Isle of Pines, his thoughts turned longingly to New York, to the urban space in which it was possible to pursue emotional attachments that took unconventional turns, in which the homosexual life style was more or less sheltered.

As a result, many poems in The Bridge center on New York City: they convey the spaces of the modern city as few other poems have  the droning menace of the abruptly-deserted subway (in "The Tunnel"), the harsh quality of mid-day light as it is reflected off the sides of skycrapers ("Proem"), or the vistas that unexpectedly open to disclose layers of the past ("Cutty Sark"). At the same time, the poems are also encoded with elements of the gay life-style. The love that is sought in the city is left unspecified, as if it were designed to be universalized, anyones love. While the poem asks to be read in this way, it also suggests that love may flourish in unexpected places. When Crane positions himself under the shadows of the bridge, he is, in one sense, simply the poet of the romantic tradition, the observer who stands aside the better to see; but he is, in another sense, the gay male cruising in an area notorious for its casual sex. Even the bridge itself, the Brooklyn Bridge that is the central object of the poem, was strongly identified in Cranes own mind with Emil Opffer, to whom Voyages was dedicated.

The appearance of the bridge secretly encrypts a highly personal memory and a specific presence in the text. Cranes "epic of America" gets underway as a personal quest, as a poem divided against itself, in devotion to an urban setting that encourages social diversity, with secret inscriptions that retain their meanings to which only a privileged few are accessible. Crane would never again write as compellingly as he did in the summer and fall of 1926. (From the same period comes the coruscating "O Carib Isle!," a poem that conveys in concrete imagery the paralyzing effects of extreme self-consciousness.) His later contributions to The Bridge can be witty, smart, magisterial, but their primary task is to fill out a narrative, to introduce elements that turn the poem in a more conventional direction. "The River" and "Cape Hatteras" dutifully explore the role of the railroad and the airplane; they intelligently consider how each new technology dominates and effectively annihilates the environment into which it is introduced. They usefully expand the scope of the poem by moving us across a vast geography.

"The River" jumps from the Dakotas to California to North Carolina before settling on its journey down the Mississippi; "Cape Hatteras" leaps from Bombay to Kitty Hawk, from the battlefields of the Civil War in Virginia to the battlefields of the Great war in the Somme. It is perhaps not an accident that a homosexual presence remains furtively on hand in both poems, in the free-ranging tramps of "the River," in the vagabond Whitman of "Cape Hatteras." For the great problem that stymied Crane after 1926 had to do with the conflict between his identity as a gay male and his identity as a poet. Numerous unpublished lyrics, most written between 1927 and 1931, attest to the struggle Crane undertook to invent a discourse that would honestly translate aspects of his homosexual experience into poetry. Publication of The Bridge in 1930 brought Crane notoriety and fame. He had been a name to reckon with earlier. Stephen Rose Benet had parodied his work in his Saturday Review column in 1928, and Man Ray had taken his photo for Vanity Fair in 1929.

Now, in 1930, he was told by Eda Lou Walton, he was being included in her New York University course in contemporary poetry. He was awarded a Guggenheim in 1931 and settled in Mexico to work on a long poem about the Aztec civilization. Little on that project was ever accomplished. In the 1920s, Crane had begun to drink heavily. Speak-easies and taverns were logical places to seek out sexual companionship. He learned early on that he could return from states of ecstasy with snatches of poetic phrasing that he could not obtain any other way. In Europe in 1929, falling in among wealthy expatriates, Crane pursued his dissolution. By 1930, friends who had not seem him for several months were expressing astonishment at his premature aging: his facial features losing sharpness and tone, his hair rapidly greying. Though the causes for anyones suicide are almost certain to be multiple, in the case of Crane it seems an act unusually overdetermined. In April of 1932, he was returning to an America that was ravaged by a financial depression.

His father had died in 1931, in the process revealing just how completely his once-ample resources had been depleted. He was returning to New York City, his Guggenheim fellowship over, knowing that tales of his drunken exploits in Mexico would have preceded him. His project of an "Aztec epic" had resulted in less than a handful of poems. The one serious work he had recently written (in March), "The Broken Tower," was essentially a love-poem, though it tellingly betrayed his longing for a time in the past that was intensely energetic and that now seemed unattainably remote. Friends were scattered. And Harry Crosby, who had encouraged Crane to finish The Bridge by offering to publish it in his Black Sun Press, had killed himself two years earlier. Years of drink had almost certainly ravaged his physical condition, undermining his ability to control his mental stability. His leap into the ocean must have seemed one of the few choices he had left. Critics acted rapidly to turn Cranes death into a lesson for other poets. They argued that his failure proved it was impossible to write a poem that was both socially engaged and aesthetically satisfying.

Tate maintained that his own "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1926) was successful precisely because of the elegiac tone it adopted, mourning an ideal that was now utterly lost. A common theme among the critics reviewing Cranes work was that the epic was impossible because modern culture lacked the very center which the epic was supposed to portray. Cranes suicide was virtually preordained, Yvor Winters suggested, by the absence of adequate intellectual pre-commitment. What poets needed, these critics concluded, was to follow more carefully the advice of critics, and both Winters and Tate followed their own advice by more or less abandoning poetry for criticism. The cultural epic  the socially-engaged sequence composed of aesthetically self-sufficient lyrics  was pronounced obsolete. Long poems could still be written, but only by representatives of the first generation of modernism  by Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens  who were entitled to continue because of their claims as "inventors" of the form. But critics in the 1930s and 1940s warned young poets away from attempting such work. These warnings were recorded in textbooks and dutifully taught in universities.

But practicing poets were likely to be unaware of such pronouncements. A "Crane tradition" of the long poem continued after his death, though the critical discourse of the academy was designed not to recognize it. Rather than being bothered by the incompleteness of Cranes project, poets were attracted to the idea of fulfilling it. Traces of his powerful rhetoric flash through numerous poets of the 1930s, including Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Fearing, and Edwin Rolfe. Among the poets most powerfully influenced by Crane was Melvin B. Tolson, whose Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) is, among many other things, a spectacular refutation of the claim that the political text cannot be an aesthetic triumph. The poets in the California Quarterly, the short-lived journal of the early 1950s that sought to present works that were both politically and aesthetically sophisticated, continually evoked Crane as an ideal. Lawrence Liptons Rainbow at Midnight (1955), a portion of which appeared in an early version in California Quarterly, pointedly invokes Crane as a figure whose absence is felt as debilitating.

(Had he lived, he would have been fifty-five in the year the poem was published.) The densely-rhetorical intellectual poetry that Harry Brown offered in 1949 in The Beast in His Hunger owes as much to Crane as Robert Lowells early work in Lord Wearys Castle (1947). By 1960, Lowell could describe Crane as "less limited than any other poet of his generation." Serious re-evaluation of Crane in the university began in 1967 when R. W. B. Lewis proposed a resolution to the dilemma of Cranes "obscurity" by invoking a visionary tradition in which clarity was not necessarily a premium. The somewhat cavalier readings of Lewis provoked several close studies. The most ground-breaking of these was completed by Thomas E. Yingling a few years before his untimely death as a victim of the AIDS epidemic, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text (1992).

In the 1970s and 1980s, the rehabilitation of Cranes reputation depended on revealing an artistry in passages that had been previously dismissed as incoherent; the newly-reconstructed Crane who emerged from such close attention was often a universalized figure. Yingling, following strong promptings in Lee Edelmans discussion of rhetorical tropes in Crane, saw that Cranes authority rested on his position as an outsider whose own writings were not only expressions of his own psychological division but also eloquent records of elaborate cultural and social divisions. Poets and Poems: Hart Crane, “The Bridge” and Me Poets and Poems: Hart Crane, “The Bridge” and Me Time’s rendings, time’s blendings they construe As final reckonings of fire and snow… (from “The River” in The Bridge) Hart Crane (1899-1932) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a well-to-do chocolate manufacturer who expected his son to follow his footsteps into the family business. That didn’t happen; Crane had no intention of that happening. Instead, he turned his attention to what he was most interested in: writing—especially poetry.

His most well-known work is The Bridge , a series of poems on the American experience. In a sense, he was trying to write the Great American Poem, much like his novelist peers were trying to write the Great American Novel, which might have already been written (Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885) (I realize that a parenthetical statement like that may cause controversy). Critics immediately found fault with The Bridge, for all kinds of reasons. They still do. I had never read the entire work until recently. In high school, our junior English class read a few excerpts from the volume, which includes short poems on Rip Van Winkle, the Brooklyn Bridge (a kind of homage to Walt Whitman ), Powhatan’s daughter, the Mississippi River, Cape Hatteras and a number of other subjects. As The Poetry Foundation’s entry on Crane points out, it was perhaps inevitable that the Great American Poem would fall short of its goals. He intended The Bridge to be a kind of response or alternative to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ; 85 years later, we’re far more familiar with The Waste Land than The Bridge.

I saw the frontiers gleaming of his mind; Or are there frontiers—running sands sometimes Running sands—somewhere—sands running… Or they may start some white machine that sings. (from “Cutty Sark” in The Bridge) Crane had a number of influences—Whitman, William Blake , Ralph Waldo Emerson , the English Romantic poets , William Butler Yeats , and James Joyce , among them. He also had a number of “anti-influences,” including his parents, his antipathy to working in business, and Cleveland. His life wasn’t long; he killed himself by jumping from a ship in the Gulf of Mexico in 1932. And if they take your sleep away sometimes They give it back again. Soft sleeves of sound Attend the darkling harbor, the pillowed bay; Somewhere out there in blankness steam Spills into steam, and wanders, washed away… (from “The Harbor Dawn” in The Bridge) I find the poems of The Bridge to be of a piece with the period of American literature I connect most strongly with—the ages of Realism and Modernism, roughly from 1890 to 1960.

I can almost pinpoint the literary start of my connection—in eighth grade, reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in my reading class. Three years later, I was reading The Great Gatsby by Hemingway’s antithesis, F. Scott Fitzgerald. That year, my junior year in high school, I wrote my term paper on the Realists, focusing on Willa Cather, Jack London, and Edith Wharton. And the poets: Edgar Lee Masters and Spoon River Anthology, which I still periodically reread; Edna St. Vincent Millay ; Edwin Arlington Robinson ; T.S. Eliot (we studied “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ” and The Waste Land in senior high school English class); Dylan Thomas ; Wallace Stevens (I never knew how taken I would be by “ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird “); the World War I poets . And Robert Frost . I came to William Faulkner in my 30s, when I read The Sound and the Fury for the first time. And then I read everything he wrote, some works twice and three times.

I’ve often asked myself why this literary period has had the most impact on me, and I keep coming back to two answers. First, I had outstanding English teachers in junior high and high school. They were a diverse and eclectic group, but what they shared was a love for literature. And they had been shaped in their literary education by the Realists and the Modernists; these were the novelists and poets they loved best. Looking back, I can see that their love, a love sometimes bordering on reverence (and occasional mania), was transmitted to me. Under the shadow by the piers I waited; Only in darkness is the shadow clear. The city’s fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year… (From “To Brooklyn Bridge” in The Bridge) Hart Crane and the Brooklyn Bridge Second, and equally important, this was the period my father came of age. He was born in 1916 in a small town in central Louisiana; a few years later the family moved to Shreveport, where my grandfather ran a small grocery store on the wrong side of the tracks. My father wanted to be a doctor, but the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression ended that dream.

Instead, he went to work as a roughneck in the East Texas oilfields. But he loved newspapers; he had delivered newspapers as a boy and he knew people at the Shreveport Journal. He landed in the circulation department and worked there until he joined the Navy in World War II. He kept a diary during his war years; as it turns out, he was also his ship’s newsletter editor. Somehow he parlayed all of that after the war into a job with a trade magazine publishing firm in New Orleans. This was the Promised Land, and still it is To the persuasive suburban land agent In bootleg roadhouses where the gin fizz Bubbles in time to Hollywood’s new love-nest pageant. (From “Quaker Hill” in The Bridge) I have young childhood memories of going to plays—community theater—with my parents. I can vaguely recall a staging of The Music Man. My father actually had a role in a local production of Bus Stop by William Inge ; he played the bus driver. I have a photograph of him and the rest of the cast. We were never close; he was that silent, World War II generation that didn’t believe in showing much emotion or feeling, especially for sons.

I was the middle of three boys, the one he and my mother didn’t have to worry about, the one who studied and didn’t cause trouble or get into fights. And so I know myself well enough to know that my love for the literary eras of the Realists and the Modernists was not simply because of my teachers and their love for the periods. Reading and studying the poetry and novels of the era is also a way, for me, to try to understand my father, the man I didn’t know very well but who had a powerful influence on my life, including my selection of study in college—journalism. To read Faulkner is to read not only small-town Mississippi but also small-town Louisiana. To read Spoon River Anthology is to walk in the old cemetery in Shreveport where my grandparents are buried. To read The Waste Land is to read how the world of the 1920s was torn asunder in the world of the 1930s, and the impact that sundering likely had on my father. It’s difficult of me to read The Bridge and see the failure that most of the critics have seen.

Instead, I read it, and I see a young man from the poor side of town, sitting in a high school Latin class with all of the rich kids, studying hard because he was still holding on to the dream of becoming a doctor. And one star, swinging, takes it place, alone, Cupped in the larches of the mountain pass— Until, immortally, it bled into the dawn. (From “Powhatan’s Daughter” in The Bridge) Browse more poets and poems ___________________________ How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included. “I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.” —Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Question: Which bridge is the subject of Hart Crane's The bridge?
Answer: Brooklyn Bridge