Hart Crane

The Bridge

With commentaries by Waldo Frank and Thomas A. Volger

Like Whitman, Hart Crane strove in his poetry to embrace America, to distill an image of America. Begun in 1923 and published 1930, The Brindge is Crane's major work. "Very roughly," he wrote a friend, "it concerns a mystical synthesis of 'America' . . . The initial impulses of 'our people' will have to be gathered up toward the climax of the bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity."

"Hart Crane may well remain as the greatest poet produced by American since Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. . . . His imaginative intensity, his flashes of imagery, his Elizabethan grandeur, make his rich black verse eclipse most of the poetry written in English since Yeats." —Henri Peyre, New York Times Book Review

The Bridge is in many respects the most important volume of poetry since Whitman's Leaves of Grass." —Malcolm Cowley

"Hart Crane's poems are profound and deep-seeking. In them he reveals with a new insight, and unique power, the mystic undertones of beauty which moves words to express vision." —Eugene O'Neill