The Bridge (long poem)

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The Bridge, first published in 1930, is Hart Crane's first, and only, attempt at an American long poem. (Its primary status as either an epic or a series of lyrical poems remains contested; recent criticism tends to read it as a hybrid, perhaps indicative of a new genre, the 'modernist epic.' [1])

The Bridge was inspired by New York City's Brooklyn Bridge, which has appeared in the work of so many poets that Poets.org named it a "poetry landmark."[2] Crane lived for some time at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, where he had an excellent view of the bridge; only after The Bridge was finished did Crane learn that one of its key builders, Washington Roebling, had once lived at the same address.[3]

Contents

[edit] Contents of The Bridge

The Bridge comprises 15 short poems, arranged as follows:

  • Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge ["Proem" is not a misprint for "poem," but a word meaning roughly "prelude."[4]]
  • Ave Maria
  • Powhatan's Daughter [section title]
    • The Harbor Dawn
    • Van Winkle
    • The River
    • The Dance
    • Indiana
  • Cutty Sark
  • Cape Hatteras
  • Three Songs [section title]
    • Southern Cross
    • National Winter Garden
    • Virginia
  • Quaker Hill
  • The Tunnel
  • Atlantis

[edit] Critical reception

Reviewed on publication as a 'failure' even by Crane's closest literary friends—Allen Tate and Yvor Winters—The Bridge has nevertheless become, at least among writers, a best-loved poem.

Harold Bloom has made his share of loving defenses of the poem[5], and the increasing number of monographs on Crane suggests a new movement in the criticism—if, that is, it is not merely indicative of that critical swell across modernist studies.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ See Daniel Gabriel's Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic (2007) ISBN 1403974454.
  2. ^ See Poetry Landmark: The Brooklyn Bridge in New York City
  3. ^ See Paul Mariani's The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (1999) ISBN 0393320413.
  4. ^ See Definition of "proem" from Merriam-Webster
  5. ^ See Bloom's 'Introduction' to Marc Simon's The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (2000) ISBN 0-87140-178-9.

[edit] External links

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