In their fifth episode, Mark and Seamus reach their first 20th century poet of the series, the Ohio-born, New York-loving ad man Hart Crane, and his epic 1930 work The Bridge. Directly inspired by The Waste Land, The Bridge sought to address modernity, as Eliot had done, with all its conflicts, contradictions and difficulties, but infuse it with a Whitman-esque expression of American greatness. Mark and Seamus discuss Crane’s multi-faceted mythologisation of the bridge, the baroque complexity of his language, the deployment of Robert Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins in service of his questing American origin story, and the personal struggles of a man who, for his brief life, found himself in the exhilarating creative centre of modernist experimentation. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up here: https://lrb.me/closereadings Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.