In his 1930 review in Hound & Horn, Allen Tate offered the first of many pronouncements on The Bridge. Drawing together his frustration with the poem’s form and Crane’s reviewers, he wrote that the ‘fifteen poems, taken as one poem, suffer from the lack of a coherent plot’, adding that ‘it is difficult to agree with those critics who find the work a single poem and as such an artistic success’. The poem appeared in two different forms: first, fragmented in periodicals, and then reassembled in the 1930 editions from Caresse Crosby’s Parisian publishing house Black Sun and New York’s Liveright. Tate’s remarks reflect how The Bridge was first presented publicly: thirteen fragments published in seven periodicals between 1927 and 1930, scattered between London, Paris, Chicago and New York.

Crane began work on The Bridge in 1923. In an interview to mark the poem’s publication, he told The Wilson Bulletin that ‘by the autumn of 1925, this plan [for the poem] had attained a definite pattern’; in March 1926 he outlined provisional sections in a letter to Otto Kahn. Although Crane had a plan for the poem early on, the fragments were not published as they were completed, nor in the order that Crane designed for the volume edition. ‘Atlantis’ was the first section to be completed, but was not submitted for journal publication. Instead, the poem was saved for the volume, bringing together the reconstituted sequence in a poem in which the fragments of The Bridge ‘leap and converge’.

As Tate’s review implies, Crane’s publishing arrangement had an effect on the reception of the poem as a ‘grand failure’ – a phrase coined by Malcolm Cowley that became a truism in criticism of the poem, propagated by influential magazines such as Poetry and Hound & Horn.