The Bridge, first published in 1930 by the Black Sun Press

Black Sun Press

The Black Sun Press was an English language book publisher founded in 1927 as Éditions Narcisse by poet Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby , American expatriates living in Paris...

, is Hart Crane's

Hart Crane

-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...

 first, and only, attempt at a long poem

Long poem

The long poem is a literary genre including all poetry of considerable length. Though the definition of a long poem is vague and broad, the genre includes some of the most important poetry ever written....

. (Its primary status as either an epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

 or a series of lyrical

Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...

 poems remains contested; recent criticism tends to read it as a hybrid, perhaps indicative of a new genre, the 'modernist epic.')

The Bridge was inspired by New York City's "poetry landmark", the Brooklyn Bridge

Brooklyn Bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. Completed in 1883, it connects the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River...

. Crane lived for some time at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...

, 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

Washington Roebling

Washington Augustus Roebling was an American civil engineer best known for his work on the Brooklyn Bridge, which was initially designed by his father John A. Roebling.-Education and military service:...

, had once lived at the same address.

Contents

The Bridge comprises 15 lyric poems of varying length and scope. "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" is the short lyrical ode to the Brooklyn Bridge

Brooklyn Bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. Completed in 1883, it connects the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River...

 and New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 which opens the sequence and serves as an introduction. After beginning with this ode, "Ave Maria" begins the first longer sequence labeled Roman numeral I which describes Columbus' accidental voyage to the Americas. The title of the piece is based upon the fact that Columbus attributed his crew's survival across the Atlantic Ocean to "the intercession of the Virgin Mary." The second major section of the poem, "Powhatan's Daughter," is divided into five parts, and one well-known part, entitled "The River," follows a group of vagabonds, in the 20th century, who are traveling west through America via train. In "The River," Crane incorporates advertisements and references Minstrel shows. He claimed in a letter that "the rhythm [in this section] is jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

." The section also includes the story of Pocahontas

Pocahontas

Pocahontas was a Virginia Indian notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. She was the daughter of Chief Powhatan, the head of a network of tributary tribal nations in Tidewater Virginia...

 (who was "Powhatan's Daughter") and a section on the fictional character Rip Van Winkle

Rip Van Winkle

"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving published in 1819, as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. Written while Irving was living in Birmingham, England, it was part of a collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon...

.

Other major sections of the poem include "Cape Hateras" (the longest individual section of the poem), "Quaker Hill," "The Tunnel," and "Atlantis," the final section that returns the poem's focus back to the Brooklyn Bridge.

Critical reception

Upon its publication, The Bridge received mostly negative reviews. Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters

Arthur Yvor Winters was an American poet and literary critic.-As modernist:Winters's early poetry, which appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, was written in the modernist idiom, and was heavily influenced both by Native American...

, one of Crane's contemporaries and friends who had praised Crane's previous book, White Buildings, wrote one of these negative reviews of The Bridge in which he correctly associated Crane's book with Modernist works by James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

 and William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

. However, Winters viewed this association negatively since he viewed Modernism negatively. So although it might sound like a compliment to 21st century readers, this grouping of Crane's latest work with Joyce and Williams was not meant as a compliment. Indeed, his main criticism of The Bridge was that "it has no narrative framework and so lacks the formal unity of an epic." Incidentally, Winters could have directed this same criticism at Williams' epic poem Paterson

Paterson (poem)

Paterson is a poem by influential modern American poet William Carlos Williams.The poem is composed of five books and a fragment of a sixth book. The five books of Paterson were published separately in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958, and the entire work was published as a unit in 1963. This book...

 or at Joyce's novel Ulysses

Ulysses (novel)

Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

.

In a slightly more mixed review, "Metaphor in Contemporary Poetry," Cudworth Flint wrote, "This poem seems to me indubitably the work of a man of genius, and it contains passages of compact imagination and compelling rhythms. But its central intention, to give to America a myth embodying a creed which may sustain us somewhat as Christianity has done in the past, the poem fails."

However, most contemporary critics now recognize the poem as a masterpiece of American Modernism, and Gregory Woods

Gregory Woods

Gregory Woods is a British poet who grew up in Ghana.Woods began his teaching career at the University of Salerno. Since 1990 he has worked at Nottingham Trent University, where, in 1998, he was appointed Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies, the first such appointment in the United Kingdom...

 writes, "Hart Crane’s place in the Modernist pantheon is established by The Bridge." Indeed, when Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

 placed Crane in his pantheon of the best Modernist American poets of the 20th century, Bloom focused on The Bridge as Crane's most significant achievement, on the same level as T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

's The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

. Recently, The Bridge was also singled out by the Academy of American Poets

Academy of American Poets

The Academy of American Poets is a non-profit organization dedicated to the art of poetry. The Academy was incorporated as a "membership corporation" in New York State in 1934...

 as one of the 20th century's "Groundbreaking Books". The organization writes that, "Physically removed from the city [since he began the piece while living in the Caribbean], Crane relied on his memory and imagination to render the numerous awesome and grotesque nuances of New York, evident in poems such as 'The Tunnel' and 'Cutty Sark.' The book’s opening, 'Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge,' is indicative of Crane’s ecstatic, symbolic vision of the modern city. . .However, [because of his suicide in April 1932,] Crane would never again complete anything as complex or compelling as The Bridge."

Composition

According to the 1988 Voices and Visions PBS documentary on Crane, when Crane first began to write The Bridge, he "felt. . .stuck and was incapable of writing more than a few lines." Around this time Crane wrote, "Emotionally I should like to write The Bridge. Intellectually the whole theme seems more and more absurd. The very idea of a bridge is an act of faith. The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exists any real links between that past and a future destiny worthy of it. If only America were half as worthy today to be spoken of as Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

 spoke of it fifty years ago, there might be something for me to say." As the poem began to take shape and showed promise, Crane wrote, "The Bridge is symphonic in including all the strands: Columbus

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...

, conquest of water, land, Pocohantas, subways, offices. The Bridge, in becoming a ship, a world, a woman, a tremendous harp as it does finally, seems to really have a career."

External links

• The Bridge, at wikilivres.info
• Text of 'To Brooklyn Bridge' (the opening poem in The Bridge) at Poets.org
• Video Interpretation of 'The River' (opening lines)