SOURCE: An introduction to The Bridge: A Poem by Hart Crane, Liveright, 1933, pp. xvii-xxxvi.

In the following essay, Frank discusses the ways in which Crane represents the quintessential poet of modern America.

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Agrarian America had a common culture, which was both the fruit and the carrier of what I have called elsewhere "the great tradition" [The Re-discovery of America]. This tradition rose in the Mediterranean world with the will of Egypt, Israel and Greece, to recreate the individual and the group in the image of values called divine. The same will established Catholic Europe, and when it failed (producing nonetheless what came to be the national European cultures), the great tradition survived. It survived in the Europe of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. With the Puritans, it was formally transplanted to the North American seaboard. Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards; later, in a more narrow sense, Jefferson, Madison...