SOURCE: ""The Bridge': "Too Impossible An Ambition?"" in Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 83-109; 121-23.

In the following essay, Berthoff uses other criticism and Crane's own correspondence to evaluate the success or failure of The Bridge.

No one now pays much attention to Edgar Allan Poe's famous pronouncement, delivered in the apprehensive dawn of literary modernism, that given natural limits to human responsiveness there can be no such thing as a satisfactory long poem; only short compositions machined to produce a single affective impression can be admired straight through. Yet understanding Poe's peremptory rule for what it was, a one-sided, problem-solving response to the pre-modernist breakdown of classicalhumanist norms of use and value (and to the underlying redistribution of cultural authority), we may have to grant that something oddly like its model of performative excellence still thrives among us. Our newest academic criticism, grown...