THE BRIDGE by HARTCRANE

A POET'S PROGRESS in fissues of the mind

Crane's hope with this masterwork of 15 poems ,was to use " our "real" world somewhat as a spring-board, and to give the poem as a whole an orbit or predetermined direction of its own." and to establish it as "free from his own personality "and " any chance evaluation on the reader’s part'.. a 'stab at truth '....and toward a 'state of consciousness', and "innocence" .His title page quotation from Job illustrates this approach 'From going to and fro in the earth/and from walking up and down in it'.
Crane uses the bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan as the 'peg' on which he explores this ambition of 'hope-cleft to despair' in the cross-over journey of human experience, common to us all.
Seventy-two pages of easy to read verse in quatrain-style form(in the main) with much use of ceasura to guide the eye (or better yet)the reciter.Read alongside the widely available audio clips of this poem is an excellent way to determine if Crane achieves his objectives for this, his best remembered poetry.
In this edition ,the original Waldo Frank introduction (1930) is helpfully supported by another from a later perspective by Thomas Vogler from 1970.