SOURCE: "Theme and Free Variation: The Scoring of Hart Crane's 'The Bridge' ," in The Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3, Autumn, 1981, pp. 197-213.

In the following essay, Sharp considers The Bridge as a piece of modern music

In a letter to Gorham Munson, Hart Crane wrote:

Modern music almost drives me crazy! I went to hear D'Indy's II Symphony last night and my hair stood on end at its revelations. To get those, and others of men like Strauss, Ravel, Scriabin, and Bloch into words, one needs to ransack the vocabularies of Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster (for theirs were the richest) and add on scientific, street and counter, and psychological terms, etc. Yet I claim such things can be done!¹¹

The reference to Vincent d'Indy and "Modern music" is helpful as a starting point to the understanding of Crane's long poem The Bridge (1930). D'Indy was the influential director of Paris's Schola...