The Bridge (long Poem) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Upon its publication, The Bridge received mostly negative reviews. Yvor Winters, a contemporary and friend of Crane's who had praised Crane's previous book, White Buildings, wrote one such review, in which he associated Crane's book with Modernist works by James Joyce and William Carlos Williams. Due to his disparaging views toward Modernism as a whole, Winters viewed such an association negatively. In Winter's own words, The Bridge "has no narrative framework and so lacks the formal unity of an epic."

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."

Critical consensus on The Bridge (and on Crane's status in the Modernist canon more broadly) still remains deeply divided. Some critics believe that The Bridge was Crane's crowning achievement, and that it is a masterpiece of American modernism. For instance, Gregory Woods writes that "Hart Crane’s place in the Modernist pantheon is established by The Bridge," and when the literary critic Harold Bloom 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, putting it on the same level as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Still, the poet/critic Randall Jarrell had much more mixed feelings about the lack of overall consistency in the epic, writing, "Hart Crane's The Bridge does not succeed as a unified work of art, partly because some of its poems are bad or mediocre;" nevertheless, Jarrell goes on to write, "how wonderful parts of The Bridge are! 'Van Winkle' is one of the clearest and freshest and most truly American poems ever written."

More recently, Jarrell and Flint's criticisms of the poem have been echoed, and even been amplified, by more conservative contemporary poetry critics like Adam Kirsch and William Logan who both wrote highly critical reviews of Crane's work following the publication of Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters by the Library of America in 2006. In an article for The New Yorker, Kirsch called The Bridge "an impressive failure. . . varies wildly in quality, containing some of Crane’s best writing and some of his worst." Then Kirsch goes on to call parts of the "Atlantis" section of the poem "exhilarating" while he criticizes the "Indiana" section for being "rankly sentimental."

From a more positive critical perspective, The Bridge was recently singled out by the Academy of American Poets as one of the 20th century's "Groundbreaking Books". The organization writes, "Physically removed from the city, 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, Crane would never again complete anything as complex or compelling as The Bridge."