Which American poet wrote the modernist epic 'The Bridge'?

The American poet who wrote the modernist epic The Bridge is Hart Crane.

First published in 1930 by the Black Sun Press, The Bridge was Crane’s first and only completed attempt at a long poem. Its central image is New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, which Crane treated as a symbol of connection, technological achievement, American history, and spiritual possibility.

The work contains 15 lyric poems rather than a single straightforward narrative. Sections such as “Ave Maria,” “Powhatan’s Daughter,” “Cape Hatteras,” “The Tunnel,” and “Atlantis” move through Columbus, Pocahontas, rail travel, industrial cities, and the American landscape. Crane blended formal metres, free verse, Elizabethan diction, everyday speech, and rhythms influenced by jazz.

Critics have debated whether The Bridge is a conventional epic or a hybrid sequence of lyrics; that debate does not change its authorship. It was conceived partly as an expansive American answer to the cultural pessimism of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and it remains Crane’s defining achievement.