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The years immediately preceding World War I saw the introduction of international modernism to America, and the years immediately following saw American artists in all the arts adopting and adapting the new ideas and grafting them onto a distinctly American consciousness. By 1923 Hart Crane was writing The Bridge (1930), in which he endeavored to unite the style of modernism—the heritage of the symbolists and postimpressionists—with the spirit of American romanticism-the heritage of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. The Bridge is Crane's longest and most ambitious work, and he saw its problematic nature even as he wrote it. "At times the project seems hopeless, horribly so," he wrote to a friend, "and then suddenly something happens inside one, and the theme and the substance of the conception seem brilliantly real, more so than ever! At least, at worst, the poem will be a huge failure!" Apart from questions of its ultimate success or failure, The Bridge retains its character as a monumental experiment, and as such stands as a landmark in twentieth-century American poetry.
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