This short animated film explores uses of metaphor as a connotative experiential phenomenon, focusing on Harold Hart Crane’s letter to Harriet Monroe, ‘Logic of metaphor’, alongside drafts of his ‘Proem to Brooklyn Bridge’. The film makes an innovative contribution to interdisciplinary research into cultural representations of literature and literary figures through animation and sound design. Using Crane’s writings to explore the potential transfer and effect of metaphorical construction processes on forms of animation, sound design and poetry, the film re-presents Crane’s work and writing methods.

Through primary research, undertaken at Columbia University in collaboration with Professor Suzie Hanna (Norwich University of the Arts) and Dr Sally Bayley (Oxford University), and with advice from Professor Langdon Hammer (Yale University) and Dr Peter J.L. Riley (Oxford University), the film addresses Crane’s views of the ‘illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness’ and their ‘combinations and interplay in metaphor’. Focusing on Crane’s methods for the assemblage of phrases into lyrics and writings on auditory technologies, the soundtrack uses materials and music described by Crane through his poetry, letters and notes, ranging from the mechanisms of a Victrola gramophone player to the tensile apparatus of large suspension bridges.

The research builds on a 10,000-word article ‘Thinking narratively, metaphorically and allegorically through animation, poetry and sound’, Journal of American Studies (2013). The article introduces the research as a basis for both the film and a critical forum featuring respondents with expertise in Crane’s life and works, and in contemporary literature, poetry, film and sound, also to be published in the Journal of American Studies (2014). Alongside a description of the methodology developed for the research, specific historical focus is given to the language theory and conceptual limitations of R.W. Emerson’s writing on symbolic, analogical and metaphoric relationships.