A Bridge Of Painting And Poetry

Hart Crane(1899-1932),during his transient lifetime,has published two volumes of poetry: The White Buildings(1926)and The Bridge(1930).While his long poem The Bridge steadily grew in statue after its publication in 1930,he has been recognized by poets and literary critics as one of the most influential poets of his generation.Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of critical studies on The Bridge,but only a few of them touched upon the unique interarts academic value in this poem.In his Museum of Words(1993),James Heffernan excludes Hart Crane's long poem The Bridge as an ekphrastic poem,on the ground that the Brooklyn Bridge the poem addresses is not created to represent any other objective image.His assertion partly causes a certain time of neglect of the poem's ekphrasistic studies.Therefore,this thesis aims to question James Heffernan's assertion on the ekphrasis of The Bridge and tries to analyze the poem from the perspective of the interarts poetics.It tries to analyze the ekphrasis of the poem in terms of the transformation in the text and the interaction between the poetic text and other forms of art,on the ground that Crane was continuously inspired by the art of photography,painting and architecture while constructing his poem The Bridge.This thesis argues that Hart Crane's The Bridge can be regarded as an ekphrastic poem because it has abundant ekphrastic elements in the text and also in the interweaving with other forms of art;and,Crane successfully turns the Brooklyn Bridge into a verbal art full of visual imagination.An ekphrastic reading of this poem not only helps offer another dimension of interpretation on the poem,but also in turn provides new materials for the interarts study nowadays and in times to come.