American failurism: hart crane’s the bridge and Kenneth Burke’s paradox of purity

Abstract

Hart Crane acknowledged the problem of creating a representative tale of the American tribe. Unlike other writers, however, Crane harnessed the long poem’s generic incapacity to universalize experience as his poem’s central structural and thematic principle. This failure of linguistic union is analogous to the failure of sexual union, but these broken erotic unions open space for poetic expressions of an unidealized myth of homosexual union.