SOURCE: "The 'Super Historical' Sense of Hart Crane's The Bridge," in Genre, Vol. XI, Winter, 1978, pp. 597-625.

In the following essay, Rowe examines the "anti-poetic " nature of the primary symbol of the bridge.

Art has the opposite effect to history; and only, perhaps, if history suffers transformation into a pure work of art, can it preserve instincts or arouse them. Such history would be quite against the analytical and inartistic tendencies of our time, and even be considered false. But the history that merely destroys without any impulse to construct will in the long run make its instruments tired of life; for such men destroy illusions, and "he who destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the ultimate tyrant, Nature."

By the word "unhistorical" I mean the power, the art, of forgetting and of drawing a limited horizon round oneself. I call the power "super-historical" which...