Hart Crane, representative American modernist, resists and re-forms social modernity in a textual realm of the epic literary tradition. However, genre studies of his text have become marginalized since New Criticism failed to appreciate the poet`s dialectic relationship with history and the value of his works as an extensive cultural text. My essay focuses on Crane`s preoccupation with genre formation with a reading of his representative American epic, The Bridge. In this essay, I elucidate three levels of the epic: the historical-social, the mythological, and the psychological level. My aim is to reveal Crane`s pattern of composition and compositional evolution in The Bridge. Crane combines his epic ambition with formal inventiveness and redefines and reconstructs history in a new form of polyphony and complexity. In his epic, Crane seeks to represent early twentieth-century America (a metaphor of the capitalist world system) through the mythical method and to regenerate corrupt reality through the sublime. The poet`s conscious and unconscious movement, and his various perceptions and emotions, record the conflict between history, myth, and the sublime. His visionary manipulation of words and genre leads to a synthesis of redemptive imagination and a harsh criticism of modernity. Crane`s epic embodies the modernist project to manage and contain social reality in the form and to subvert the closed capitalist system from the inside.