Hart Crane's long poem The Bridge has steadily
grown in stature since it was published in 1930. At
first branded a noble failure by a few influential
critics- a charge that became conventional wisdom-this
panoramic work is now widely regarded as one of the
finest achievements of twentieth-century American
poetry. It unites mythology and modernity as a means of
coming to terms with the promises, both kept and broken,
of American experience.The Bridge is also very
difficult. It is well loved but not well understood.
Obscure and indirect allusions abound in it, some of
them at surprisingly fine levels of detail. The many
references to matters of everyday life in the 1920s may
baffle or elude today's readers. The elaborate compound
metaphors that distinguish Crane's style bring together
diverse sources in ways that make it hard to say what,
if anything, is going onin the text. The poem is replete
with topical and geographical references that demand
explication as well as identification. Many passages are
simply incomprehensible without special knowledge, often
special knowledge of a sort that is not readily
available even today, when Google and Wikipedia are only
a click away.Until now, there has been no single source
to which a reader can go for help in understanding and
enjoying Crane's vision. There has been no convenient
guide to the poem's labyrinthine complexities and to its
dense network of allusions-the thousands of strandsthat,
Crane boasted, had to be sorted out, researched, and
interwovento compose the work.This book is that guide.
Its detailed and far-reaching annotations make The
Bridge fully accessible, for the first time, to its
readers, whether they are scholars, students, or simply
lovers of poetry.
|
|