| "Hart Crane's The Bridge as a Hybrid Form" examines The Bridge as a multivalent work of lyric and epic coding. The poem is perceived as a formal hybrid, and thematically as an amalgam of world views, ultimately a "visionary epic" of tragic import. This study takes into account historical, literary-historical, and personal forces on the making and meanings of The Bridge, and analyzes the structural coding of lyric and epic, with a close reading of select sections in each mode. The tragic thematics of the work are also examined in some detail, and the hybrid form itself comes under close scrutiny in the final chapter. An important "macro"-objective of the dissertation is the interrelationship of form to world view--how the interfusion of a "lyric consciousness" and an "epic consciousness" bears on the meaning structure of the poem and the poet's attitude to the world.;Though The Bridge grows out of lyric roots, as does the modernist epic in general, it expands upon these roots in its multiple voicing and in its expression of collective experience. It is a work both personal and social, subjective and objective--one in which, in the terms of Kate Hamburger, an intense "lyric I" engages a mediated "epic I." The Bridge's tragic sense is not ultimately one of defeat, and it is a poem finally that longs for a better future, however problematic, both in personal and in cultural terms.;Through its hybrid form, The Bridge becomes a unified poem, and its diversity and "disjunctive" character must be read as key elements in the "modernist epic" at large. The Bridge, in fact, behaves according to what I consider a new genre of the twentieth century--the "hybrid modernist epic"--and this genre generally exhibits a lyric-epic coding and a tragic thematics. Other modernist epics are examined in some detail--The Cantos, The Waste Land, and Paterson--in order to establish the groundwork and to define the properties of this new genre, and in order to locate The Bridge in its proper environment and context. |
