SOURCE: "Toward a Poetics of Technology: Hart Crane and the American Sublime," in The Southern Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, January, 1984, pp. 68-81.

In the following essay, Chaffin contends that The Bridge is most properly read as exemplary of representations of the sublime in American literature.

To his critics, Hart Crane remains an inspired but troublesome poet—one whose reach, in the end, far exceeded his grasp. Particularly vexing to assayers of his poetic legacy has been The Bridge, Crane's intended magnum opus, which was published in 1930, two years before his suicide.

While critics have come to acknowledge the breadth and uneven brilliance of some of the poem's fine lyrical passages, they also generally lament it as one of the more hubristic acts of poetic enterprise in American literature. "Perhaps none in our time has failed more gloriously," says Hyatt Waggoner in a 1950 study. Even Crane's friend Allen Tate, who...