William Styron's SOPHIE'S CHOICE and Hart Crane's THE HARBOR DAWN

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKEYWORDS: BridgeCraneStyronsuicidewar Notes 1. Yvor Winters, in “The Progress of Hart Crane,” writes, “The book cannot be called an epic, in spite of its endeavor to create and embody a national myth, because it has no narrative framework and so lacks the formal unity of an epic” (73). 2. Crane writes, in a letter to Waldo Frank: “The poem, as a whole, is, I think, an affirmation of experience, and to that extent is ‘positive’ rather than ‘negative’ in the sense that The Waste Land is negative” (Letters 351). Gregory Woods also details Crane's reimagining of Eliot's The Waste Land. 3. Two excellent discussions about Crane's homosexuality in relation to his poetry and comparisons to Whitman may be found in Paul Giles's article, “Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality” and Thomas A. Yingling's “The Unmarried Epic.” 4. For further discussion of Pocahontas as symbol, see L. S. Dembo's chapter “Powhatan's Prodigal Daughter.” 5. For a detailed examination of the Brooklyn Bridge as symbol, see Vincent Quinn's chapter “The Bridge.”