The Lyric Mode of The Bridge: The I and the Other

Abstract

Hart Crane’s lyric voice is his decisive contribution to twentieth-century poetry. His career began in the fragile lyrics of his early youth, evolved to his desire for “universality” in “Faustus and Helen,” and returned to the personal mode of the effusive “Voyages.” These two sequences were preparatory to the more complex and tortured world of The Bridge. The Key West cycle of poems he was arranging at his death introduced a grimmer Crane, more ironic, more experienced; and they too were modulated by the unabashed sublime of the later, last poem, “The Broken Tower.”