Jo Gill
Bio
Jo Gill is Professor of Twentieth-Century and American Literature at the University of Exeter, UK, and Dean of the College of Humanities. She specializes in mid-century literature and culture and on poetry and the built environment.
Contributions
Hart Crane: The “Architectural Art”
From the Print Journal
In the near-century since the publication of The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane has been widely recognized as the poet of urban modernity, or, in his own words, as a “suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age.” He has been acclaimed as celebrant and critic, by turn, of America’s myth of itself and as a pioneer cartographer of the queer spaces of the modern metropolis. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is his rendering of the late nineteenth-century Brooklyn Bridge (designed by John Roebling, started in 1869 and opened in 1883), which has been taken as central to his vision of early twentieth-century America’s tensile complexity. I don’t demur from this position; but I do argue that for Crane it was not only the Bridge as manifestation in stone and steel of his nation’s past, present and future, that mattered. As important were the larger technologies, practices, and discourses of architecture which produced the Bridge, determined his experience of it, and shaped his understanding of its significance. Another way of putting this is to say that the Bridge (and The Bridge) are necessary, but not entirely sufficient, components of Crane’s construction of modernity and that to understand his emerging vision of America, we need to look to his larger engagement with contemporary architecture in all of its variety and potency. The purpose of this article, then, is to bring Crane’s architectural interests to the fore, to address the specificity of architectural allusion in his poetry, and to move beyond an assessment of the Bridge’s symbolic value and towards a more granular reading of the way architecture functions across his oeuvre, of the forms it takes, and the meanings it assumes. It goes without saying that poetry provides Crane with a medium in which to discuss architecture. More importantly, architecture provides him with a way of thinking and speaking about poetry. First in early poems from White Buildings (1926) and subsequently in The Bridge, he engages in an assessment of architectural effect while also testing the capacity of poetry to deliver such an account. So, while The Bridge is a poem about the Brooklyn Bridge, it is also a poem about poetry.
