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 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, 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."
Read more about this topic: The Bridge (long Poem)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Vices enter into the composition of virtues as poisons into the composition of certain medicines. Prudence and common sense mix them together, and make excellent use of them against the misfortunes that attend human life.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)