Hart Crane`s The Bridge and the Catastrophe of Modern Energetics

By the development of technology, the shift in energy history from coal capitalism to oil-electric capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ensued the changing cultural conceptualizations and representations of psyche, body, society, and environment, which in turn transformed the symbolic cultures, and among them literature. Scientific progress as an inseparable form of modernism has penetrated the cultural vocabulary, leading many writers to borrow from technological terminologies to express their ideas in the aesthetic realm. The early twentieth century American poet, Hart Crane (1899-1932), chronicles aspects of this immense social and cultural change. Despite the ambivalent attitude towards technology in his poetical collection, The Bridge, Crane declares homage to Whitman, and at the same time, by considering the complexities of modern life in relation to the developments of technology, he takes distance from his technological utopianism. By both celebrating and condemning the Machine Age , Crane`s masterpiece signifies a successful example of futuristic poetry in America. The use of corporeal tropes and representing various manifestations of technological progress displays both skepticism and enthusiasm towards modernism that also provides the unprecedented link between evolution and technology reaching to an early example of technological sublime.

کلیدواژه ها:

technology ، modernist poetry ، Hart Crane ، The Bridge ، technological sublime