In one of his letters Hart Crane wrote,
"Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland,
Ohio," comparing—misspelling and all—the great French
poet’s cosmopolitan roots to his own more modest ones in
the midwestern United States. Rebelling against the
notion that his work should relate to some European
school of thought, Crane defiantly asserted his freedom
to be himself, a true American writer. John T. Irwin,
long a passionate and brilliant critic of Crane, gives
readers the first major interpretation of the poet’s
work in decades.
Irwin aims to show
that Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge is
the best twentieth-century long poem in English. Irwin
convincingly argues that, compared to other long poems
of the century, The Bridge is the
richest and most wide-ranging in its mythic and
historical resonances, the most inventive in its
combination of literary and visual structures, the most
subtle and compelling in its psychological
underpinnings. Irwin brings a wealth of new and varied
scholarship to bear on his critical reading of the
work—from art history to biography to classical
literature to philosophy—revealing The
Bridge to be the near-perfect synthesis of
American myth and history that Crane
intended.
Irwin contends that the most
successful entryway to Crane’s notoriously difficult
shorter poems is through a close reading of The
Bridge. Having admirably accomplished this,
Irwin analyzes Crane’s poems in White
Buildings and his last poem, "The Broken
Tower," through the larger context of his epic, showing
how Crane, in the best of these, worked out the
structures and images that were fully developed in
The
Bridge.
Thoughtful,
deliberate, and extraordinarily learned, this is the
most complete and careful reading of Crane’s poetry
available. Hart Crane may have lived in Cleveland, Ohio,
but, as Irwin masterfully shows, his poems stand among
the greatest written in the English language.