SOURCE: "The Success of Failure: Hart Crane's Revisions of Whitman and Eliot in 'The Bridge '," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 54, No. 1, January, 1989, pp. 55-70.

In the following essay, Schultz considers the use Crane made of the works T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman in writing The Bridge.

Hart Crane composed The Bridge during the seven years between 1923 and 1930. His ambitions for the poem were enormous: it was to be nothing less than what he called, in letters to his patron otto Kahn, "a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America" (Letters 223) and "an epic of the modern consciousness" (308). The very scope of his ambition threatened the project with failure, and the last sections that Crane wrote, including "The Tunnel" (1926) and "Cape Hatteras" (1929), deal very directly with poetic ambition and failure.¹ In a 20 June 1926 letter to Waldo Frank, Crane expressed the fear that he was...