The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Your primary presumption that The Bridge was proffered as an epic has no substantial foundation. You know quite well that I doubt that our present stage of cultural development is so ordered yet as to provide the means or method for such an organic manifestation as that.
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
I just can't sit down and write three verses and a chorus and a bridge anymore. It just don't find it inspiring.
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
There are no bridges in folk songs because the peasants died building them.
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.