SOURCE: "The 'Super Historical' Sense of Hart Crane's The Bridge," in Genre, Vol. XI, Winter, 1978, pp. 597-625.

[In the following essay, Rowe examines the "anti-poetic " nature of the primary symbol of the bridge.]

Art has the opposite effect to history; and only, perhaps, if history suffers transformation into a pure work of art, can it preserve instincts or arouse them. Such history would be quite against the analytical and inartistic tendencies of our time, and even be considered false. But the history that merely destroys without any impulse to construct will in the long run make its instruments tired of life; for such men destroy illusions, and "he who destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the ultimate tyrant, Nature."

By the word "unhistorical" I mean the power, the art, of forgetting and of drawing a limited horizon round oneself. I call the power "super-historical" which turns the eyes from the process of becoming to that which gives existence an eternal and stable character—to art and religion.

—Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (1874)

Even more explicitly than Williams' Paterson or Eliot's The Waste Land, Crane's The Bridge seems to establish its proper poetic site. Everything in the poem refers quite clearly to the "bridge" as the central poetic telos. As a poetic symbol, the "bridge" appears to be even more fundamentally grounded in the particular and local than Williams' Paterson, New Jersey. The poet who announces his subject to be a "city" speaks already of his own selective reading of a topography—architecture, history, population—that is notoriously difficult to chart. The Brooklyn Bridge, however, is sufficiently modern and particular to be encompassed in a single visionary act; the imagination is capable to the task of conceptualizing at least this beginning: the bridge as artifact. Even acknowledging Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," the reader shares Crane's sense of the bridge as initially "anti-poetic," in itself a stout, graceless structure with hardly the "curveship" of loftier bridges. And yet nothing in the poem is more problematic than this apparently sharp particularity of Crane's central symbol. The bridge is the desired condition, the Word that redeems the words, the Atlantis of the imagination; this mythic bridge seems the antithesis of the homely, commercial bridge out of which it is shaped. It is, of course, characteristic of Crane's method to make "A grail of laughter of an empty ash can" or to transform the mechanized destruction of the technological age into "Easters of speeding light—/ Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace. . . . "" But Crane's extended mediation on the poetic conception of "bridging"—of poetry as a spiritual "bridging"—is not to be explained fully by his tendency to metamorphose substantial facts into spiritual metaphors. The very "anti-poetic" character of Crane's central symbol offers us an entrance into this concept of "bridging," because to "bridge" is always to declare the emptiness of the pure act and its dependence upon the abyss to be spanned.

And yet in this poem, "bridging" itself is the proper poetic site, the nothingness on which the poem is based and toward which it moves. We are accustomed to think of a telos in spatial metaphors as a site at the end of a journey; the bridge is the "between," an Atlantis or utopia that measures the distance separating the voyager's origins and ends. Does the bridge mark an arrival or a departure? For Crane, it serves both purposes at once; it is an approach toward Atlantis in the very act of leaving the corruptions of American history behind. But this is not quite correct, because the bridge is neither arrival nor departure, but the waiting hesitation between, a "noplace" where origins and ends are determined. Heidegger uses the metaphor of the bridge in a similar fashion to represent that poetic thinking whereby man measures his dwelling on the earth and in time:

The bridge swings over the stream "with ease and power." It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. Thus it guides and attends the stream through the meadows. Resting upright in the stream's bed, the bridgepiers bear the swing of the arches that leave the stream's waters to run their course. . . . Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more.²

There is no "between" to measure temporal sites before there is a bridge, before the poet has fissured the naive continuity of past, present, and future. On the metaphysical axis, the division of man and the gods has no meaning until there is this "between," until there is some need for or will toward a bridge that measures this distance.

Crane's poem is full of mythical sites, all of which seem to be synthesized in the same goal. Yet, there is a difference between Atlantis and Cathay; Atlantis represents the "between" and thus its impossibility as a transcendental site or Belle Isle. Atlantis is the "between" that elsewhere is figured as the bridge or the sea:

O Thou who sleepest on Thyself, apart
Like ocean athwart lanes of death and birth,
And all the eddying breath between dost search
Cruelly with love thy parable of man,—
Inquisitor! incognizable Word
Of Eden and the enchained Sepulchre,
Into thy steep savannahs, burning blue,
Utter to loneliness the sail is true.

["Ave Maria"]

Columbus discovers his New World in neither Cathay nor America, but in his voyaging between the Old World and the New.³ The divinity that Columbus invokes is represented by the "teeming span" of the sea and the "orbic wake of thy once whirling feet. . . . " "Cathay" may be the "word" that Columbus brings back to Court, but he already anticipates the ways in which that word will be corrupted:

—Yet no delirium of jewels! O Fernando,
Take of that eastern shore, this western sea,
Yet yield thy God's, thy Virgin's charity!

—Rush down the plenitude, and you shall see
Isaiah counting famine on this lee!

Yet, Columbus' warnings can have no value for those who have not endured the spiritual rite de passage of the voyage, which is accomplished as much by the imagination of the explorer as by his starry navigation. Only in this "between"may the dream of Cathay be truly measured: "For here between two worlds, another, harsh, / This third, of water,. . . . "

Columbus' warning that we must not "Rush down the plenitude" of the New World anticipates Crane's general critique of modern American history, which finds its "civilized" origin in Fernando's impulse toward exploitation. For Crane, American history has not constructed that living "bridge" of the present that would measure the relations of past and future, man and the gods. Epitomizing modern historical movement, the 20th-century Limited of "The River" employs its speed to give the illusion of the particular and manifold converging in a debased unity.⁴ Train and River, train as river, achieve the same poetic destiny in the "Gulf," which represents in this section of the poem only the destructive element of the sea. In "Ave Maria," the sea threatens death but also promises discovery and thus serves as that space in which man "ventures" his being. In "The River," there are no tidal movements to the modern flow that ends only in the boundless sea:

The River, spreading, flows—and spends your
dream.
What are you, lost within this tideless spell?
You are your father's father, and the stream—
A liquid theme that floating niggers swell.

When Crane writes, "You are your father's father," he is not referring to the sort of poetic inversion of genealogy that Stephen Dedalus discusses in Ulysses. Crane's lines betray no sense of the poetic genius as "the father of all his race" and thus his father's father, even though this Joycean notion has some similarities with Crane's own poetic goals elsewhere in The Bridge. In this river, "you are your father's father," because all proper historical and ontological distinctions have been blurred and confused. The goal of the river merely parodies the poet's own spiritual aim to discover something that endures, a center that will hold:

Poised wholly on its dream, a mustard glow
Tortured with history, its one will—flow!
—The Passion spreads in wide tongues, choked
and
slow,
Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below.

In "Cape Hatteras," Crane expresses the destructive will of modern history in terms of a literal assault on heaven. The "new verities" and "new inklings" that hum in the "dynamos" define the "blind ecstasy" of a will to destroy life as a system of differences. Crane links the modern worship of sheer Power to the human yearning to overcome spatiotemporal bonds. Crane's argument in this section recalls Nietzsche's definition of "nihilism" as the hatred (ressentiment) of life itself that compels man to invert his creative powers into a will to nothingness:

The history of philosophy is a secret raging against the pre-conditions of life, against the value feelings of life, against partisanship in favor of life. Philosophers have never hesitated to affirm a world provided it contradicted this world and furnished them with a pretext for speaking ill of this world. It has been hitherto the grand school of slander; and it has imposed itself to such an extent that today our science, which proclaims itself the advocate of life, has accepted the basic slanderous position and treated this world as apparent, this chain of causes as merely phenomenal. What is it really that hates here?⁵

Whitman's "eyes, like the Great Navigator's without ship," represent a mythic vision in direct opposition to modern man's sight of himself as a fully determined creature: "Seeing himself an atom in a shroud—/ Man hears himself an engine in a cloud!" What Whitman "sees" is quite predictably the rich variety of a world that urban man is rapidly obliterating:

Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt
Of canyoned traffic . . . Confronting the
Exchange,
Surviving in a world of stocks,—they also range
Across the hills where second timber strays
Back over Connecticut farms, abandoned
pastures,—
Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth!

Whitman's vision is "tidal, undenying, bright with myth," because it brings society and nature into dynamic relation. For Crane, Whitman's attention to the particularities of human and natural experience is a poetic mode of "bridging" that he himself would approximate. Whitman does not offer a simple pastoral escape from social corruptions, but he "confronts" the Exchange and still "survives" "in a world of stocks."

In a similar sense, Crane does not want to eliminate modern technology, but merely deromanticize the myth of the machine by appropriating man's mechanical inventions to serve his spiritual needs: "Machinery will tend to lose its sensational glamour and appear in its true subsidiary order in human life as use and continual poetic allusion subdue its novelty. . . . The power and beauty of machinery . . . can not act creatively in our lives until, like the unconscious, nervous responses of our bodies, its connotations emanate from within—forming as spontaneous a terminology of poetic reference as the bucolic world of pasture, plow, and barn."⁶ Like Emerson, Crane considers man to be the poetic interpreter of nature's hieroglyphic script, and by means of his interpretations man liberates nature to its own creative, metamorphic powers. Man "improves upon" nature only by allowing nature to realize its spirituality in and through the project of human be-ing in the world:

Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space . . .

Remember, Falcon-Ace,
Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge
To conjugate infinity's dim marge—
Anew .. . !

The very pulse of man, the throb of his blood in the wrist, is a "Sanskrit charge" to mark this between of the earth and the sky, of beings and Being, that constitutes man's being in time.

Modern man has lost the poet's sense of this "measuretaking" of man and nature, city and country. Crane's aviators recall only ironically the visionary flights of Columbus or Whitman in "Passage to India." The planes themselves figure the destruction that man has brought upon his own nature in trying to "splinter Space" and thus destroy the "between" that is invoked by the poet as the true ontological bridge. The battle is initially represented as an attack by the aviators on the clouds themselves, recalling the Titans' vain assaults on heaven: "Up-chartered choristers of their own speeding / They, cavalcade on escapade, sheer Cumulus—/ Lay siege and hurdle Cirrus down the skies!" But the real war is conducted by man against his own nature. The downward spirals of the planes suggest a dance, but one that only ironically recalls the rhythms of life and death in "The Dance." Here we have only a danse macabre:

Giddily spiralled
gauntlets, upturned, unlooping
In guerilla sleights, trapped in combustion gyring, dance and curdled depth
down whizzing
Zodiacs, dashed
(now nearing fast the Cape!)
down the gravitation's
vortex into crashed
.... dispersion . . . into mashed and shapeless
debris. . . .
By Hatteras bunched the beached heap of high
bravery!

The predominant alliteration in these final lines suggests the ironic unity that the planes have achieved in their "dispersion." Crane struggles to bring destruction and creation, death and birth, into some new relation, which reveals his Romantic impulse to find order in and through dialectical differences. Thus Whitman holds the "heights" most surely "at junctions elegiac, there, of speed / With vast eternity." Crane finds "eternity" only in the "junction" of death and life, past and future, that enables man to measure his relation to Being and to time. Whitman is the father of "our Myth," whose "boldest heel" echoes Elohim's "sounding heel" in "Ave Maria," but not for reasons of his originality or transcending genius: "Not greatest, thou,—not first, nor last,—but near / And onward yielding past my utmost year." Whitman provides the poet with his own imaginative eucharist (Panis Angelicas), because like the hoboes of "The River" and the "mendicants in public places" he participates in the "dayspring's spreading arc." As the poet who celebrates man's temporal situation as the proper site of his spiritual dwelling, Whitman serves as Crane's democratic muse: "Whitman . . . better than any other, was able to coördinate those forces in America which seem most intractable, fusing them into a universal vision which takes on additional significance as time goes on."⁷

The rapid pace of the modern world is based on the destruction of time and thus the destruction of the earth as such: "Years of the Modern! Propulsions toward what capes?" The poet's purpose is to reappropriate the misdirected energy of the modern age in order to establish an authentic human community on earth and in time. Crane wrote to Waldo Frank: "The validity of a work of art is situated in contemporary reality to the extent that the artist must honestly anticipate the realization of his vision in "action' (as an actively operating principle of communal works and faith), and I don't mean by this that his procedure requires any bona finde evidences directly and personally signalled, nor even any physical signs or portents."⁸ Modern America pits history against nature; technological man is never "timely" for Crane, because he destroys the very ground of "time" that is the tidal and seasonal movements of the body of nature. The pioneers initiate this historical destruction of what is most "timely" in themselves:

A dream called Eldorado was his town,
It rose up shambling in the nuggets' wake,
It had no charter but a promised crown
Of claims to stake.

The "charter" for this dream is a crown of thorns that promises the crucifixion of nature and the barren spoils reaped by her murderers:

But we,—too late, too early, howsoever—
Won nothing out of fifty-nine—those years—
But gilded promise, yielded to us never,
And barren tears. . .

The mother's appeal to her first-born son, the voyager, is to "come back to Indiana—not too late!" The "timeliness" of the poet is his discovery of human being in time and the nature of that being as a function of the earth's time and man's dwelling in it. What Heidegger writes of Rilke seems equally appropriate for Crane in this context: "What Rilke calls Nature is not contrasted with history. Above all, it is not intended as the subject matter of natural science. Nor is Nature opposed to art. It is the ground for history and art and nature in the narrower sense. In the word Nature as used here, there echoes still the earlier word phusis, equated also with zoe, which we translate "life.' In early thought, however, the nature of life is not conceived in biological terms, but as the phusis, that which arises. In line 8 of our poem, "Nature' is also called "Life.' Nature, Life here designate Being in the sense of all beings as a whole."⁹

Crane's poet and voyager resist technological man's lust for dominion and self-assertion by submitting themselves to the natural energies that define them. The Dionysian ritual of "The Dance" is the poet's effort to experience the Willof nature in itself as a creative principle, an intoxicating power that negates the determinism of the modern age. Crane quite explicitly approximates Nietzsche's sense of the revel as a sudden liberation:

Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered. Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded, each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him—as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness. Man now expresses himself through song and dance as the member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk, how to speak, and is on the brink of taking wing as he dances.¹⁰

This is the self-abrogating freedom that Crane had attempted to express in "The Wine Menagerie," in which the surfaces of an artificial world are rent to reveal:

New thresholds, new anatomies! Wine talons
Build freedom up about me and distill
This competence—to travel in a tear
Sparkling alone, within another's will.

In "The Dance," this Dionysian power achieves its highest expression in the rhythms of apparently intractable forces. The poet becomes Maquokeeta, his enemies, Pocahontas, and the very earth that their rituals of procreation and destruction celebrate. The poet identifies himself with the body of America as he measures the rhythms of the seasons, which are invoked as the basis for that time in which man lives truly:

Thewed of the levin, thunder-shod and lean,
Lo, through what infinite seasons dost thou
gaze—
Across what bivouacs of thine angered slain,
And see'st thy bride immortal in the maize!

Totem and fire-gall, slumbering pyramid—
Though other calendars now stack the sky,
Thy freedom is her largesse, Prince, and hid
On paths thou knewest best to claim her by.

The discovery of this natural time, of man's "timeliness," involves a form of forgetting as well. It seems especially ironic that The Bridge should be counted a failure for being insufficiently "historical," because Crane's very effort to transform American history is also an attempt to destroy the hold of that history on contemporary man.¹¹ "Van Winkle" makes explicit Crane's desire to liberate America from its imprisonment in "what was":

And Rip forgot the office hours,and he forgot the pay;Van Winkle sweeps a tenementway down on Avenue A,—

Like the hoboes and mendicants outside of time, Van Winkle escapes the historical determinants of a culture that lives in the evasive future of unrealizable dreams. Memory as well can serve to alienate man from his present and condemn him to an anguished, life-denying nostalgia for what is lost:

So memory, that strikes a rhyme out of a box,
Or splits a random smell of flowers through
glass—
Is it the whip stripped from the lilac tree
One day in spring that my father took to me,
Or is it the Sabbatical, unconscious smile
My mother almost brought me once from church
And once only, as I recall—?

Whether it be the father's "whip" or the mother's "Sabbatical, unconscioussmile," the poet's memory of punishment or unrealized love only corrupts the present and saps his will. The rush to obliterate the present in "The River" is shown to be as much a function of an overly historical culture as of an excessively progressive culture: both destroy "time" as Crane understands it. As Nietzsche writes in The Use and Abuse of History:

One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything to make others happy. The extreme case would be the man without any power to forget who is condemned to see "becoming" everywhere. Such a man no longer believes in himself or his own existence; he sees everything fly past in an eternal succession and loses himself in the stream of becoming. At last, like the logical disciple of Heraclitus, he will hardly dare to raise his finger. Forgetfulness is a property of all action, just as not only light but darkness is bound up with the life of every organism.¹²

Interpretations of The Bridge that attempt to read it according to traditional models for an historical or mythic consciousness fail to recognize that the poem itself is an extended attack on the very idea of American history, whose obsession with the past or future has exhausted the synergy of the present:

Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny's belt,
Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate....
Keep hold of that nickel for car-change, Rip,—
Have you got your "Times"—?
And hurry along, Van Winkle—it's getting late!

Characteristically doubling his key images in order to emphasize the differences between the superficiality of urban life and the poet's spiritual vision, Crane uses these lines proleptically to anticipate the more authentic harmony of time and space in "The Dance":

We danced, O Brave, we danced beyond their
farms,
In cobalt desert closures made our vows .. .

Now is the strong prayer folded in thine arms,
The serpent with the eagle in the boughs.

And this coupling of time and space in the dance is echoed later in Crane's renewed sense of Whitman's "Open Road": "To course that span of consciousness thou'st named / The Open Road—thy vision is reclaimed! / What heritage thou'st signalled to our hands!" ("Cape Hatteras"). Crane's very poetic style relies on ironic allusions, doubled images, and prolepses to suggest the "temporality" of the poem as bridge in the very rhythms of writing. The origins and ends of the poem are made to serve the architecture that constitutes the present of the poetic activity: "For poetry is an architectural art, based not on Evolution or the idea of progress, but on the articulation of the contemporary human consciousness sub specie aeternitatis, and inclusive of all readjustments incident to science and other shifting factors related to that consciousness."¹³

The past—the lost mythic impulse, the corruptions of the pioneers, Whitman's prophetic vision—and the future—the acceleration of man's self-destruction, the poet's own aim to restore an American mythos—are appropriately divided within themselves by positive and negative potentialities. The poet brings these potentialities into relief by attempting to employ them in his own architecture by forgetting, recalling, metamorphosing, and prophesying. Thus the "between" of the bridge realizes itself as a "measure-taking" of human being in the present by means of its own mode of poetic appropriation.¹⁴ Unlike the antiquarians who live only to deny life for the sake of the dead past or the "egoists" who yearn for a utopia in revenge against their time-bound existences, Crane's poet builds that present in which the past and future assume a meaningful relation to life. Like Nietzsche, Crane recognizes the dangers of an "excess of history" that threaten man's fundamental need to live in a world of time: "If there is no constructive impulse behind the historical one, if the clearance of rubbish is not merely to leave the ground free for the hopeful living future to build its house, if justice alone be supreme, the creative instinct is sapped and discouraged."¹⁵

Crane's architecture of the "contemporary consciousness" is based on the creative energy of the body, which in his moments of greatest Dionysian intoxication the poet experiences as both vast natural forces and man's own sexual potency.¹⁶ Like Williams, Crane insists upon "No ideas but in things" and attempts to renew contact with natural things by using poetic language to produce certain affective resonances, "like the unconscious nervous responses of our bodies," in which "connotations emanate from within."¹⁷ Poetry is thus a spontaneous dance in which man expresses and celebrates his most fundamental needs, desires, and drives. "Spontaneity" for Crane, however, is not merely the uncontrolled overflow of powerful feelings; the poet must first break down those intervening fictions that "splinter space" or split "a random smell of flowers through glass." In "Modern Poetry," Crane tries to argue against the "familiar contention that science is inimical to poetry" by insisting upon their different epistemologies: "That 'truth' which science pursues is radically different from the metaphorical, extra-logical 'truth' of the poet."¹⁸ Yet, The Bridge makes it clear that the poet "can absorb the machine" only by violating scientific categories with his own mode of poetic thinking. The dislocations of the poem follow the "logic of metaphor" to expose the superficiality of certain modes of causal and intentional thinking that govern modern man's historical determinism. The modern historian records selected "events" to give the illusion of coherence and order; Crane uses experience to inspire that poetry through which man expresses his being. Like Williams in Spring and All, Crane struggles to "raise to some approximate co-extension with the universe" wherein the poet learns: "To perfect the ability to record at the moment when consciousness is enlarged by the sympathies and the unity of imagination which the imagination gives, to practice skill in recording the force moving, then to know it, in the largeness of its proportions."¹⁹

Thus Crane's poetic "object" is not an empirical "thing" purified of ideas, but the thing-in-itself: the creative force in which natural and verbal signs originate and endure. Most often critics have assumed Crane's Logos or "incognizable Word" to be an ineffable spiritual unity for which the poet vainly strives. But Crane's Word is the measure-taking of poetry that constitutes the present of the "between," the bridge. Word, Myth, Bridge, Atlantis—these apparently transcendent ideals or supreme fictions are defined repeatedly as metaphors for the differential energy governing man's being in the seasonal timeliness of the world:

Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth
Whose fell unshadow is death's utter wound,—
O River-throated—iridescently upborne
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;
With white escarpments swinging into light,
Sustained in tears the cities are endowed
And justified conclamant with ripe fields
Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.

["Atlantis," my italics]

The terrible brightness ("fell unshadow") of this Myth is "death's utter wound," because the Myth establishes the enduring nature of man's dwelling on earth. The Myth is in time and of time rather than an effort to escape time, and thus it is a figure for that energy of creation and destruction in which life itself is preserved as a system of differences. Everything converges only ironically:

Into what multitudinous Verb the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In myriad syllables,—Psalm of Cathay!
O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm .. . !

As Pearce and others have suggested, the "multitudinous Verb" is language itself: "The power of human agency is imputed to things which don't actually have them. But don't they really? Crane is asking. Isn't the whole of reality chargedwith the power of agency? And isn't it the peculiar burden of language to reveal that power to us—that power which will prove to be ours, since it is our language? Man, through language, is maker and master of all he surveys, including himself."²⁰ Yet, Pearce has described the language of technology that betrays man's lust for dominion and assertion over the earth; this is hardly the language of being that Crane would have speak man into his true human dwelling. By the very nature of its inherent differences, this primal language can never be commanded by a single agent or subject. The earth is that "multitudinous Verb" in which "the suns and synergy of waters ever fuse" and thus the Logos that is defined both by fusion and dispersion. As Emerson writes in "The Poet," "we participate the invention of nature" by sharing in this creative enterprise and bringing ourselves and nature into more authentic and vital relation.²¹ It is emphatically not "our language" that Crane invokes with his Word, but the language of the earth that ought to speak through us. The Dionysian energy of nature is never commanded by our words; indeed, in his moments of greatest intoxication, Crane's poet achieves his most profound visions by virtue of his loss of self.²² Liberated from his historical and physical particularity, the poet becomes his various personae in the poem and ultimately fuses with the bridge as poetic act. As Nietzsche puts it: "No longer the artist, he has himself become a work of art: the productive power of the whole universe is now manifest in his transport, to the glorious satisfaction of the primordial One. The finest clay, the most precious marble—man—is here kneaded and hewn, and the chisel blows of the Dionysiac world artist are accompanied by the cry of the Eleusinian mystagogues: "Do you fall on your knees, multitudes, do you divine your creator?'²³ Crane's "primordial One" is the energy of differences, never a synthesis that would destroy those tensive and productive relations.

Throughout The Bridge Crane's various avatars of the feminine principle represent a creativity and fecundity that are coupled properly with destruction and death. Pocahontas focuses these various elements of creative potential; she is the figure of a certain historical "bridge" that measures "the conflict between the two races in this dance" as well as a "common basis of our meeting" as "a star that hangs between day and night."²⁴ As Crane suggests in his explanatory letter to Kahn, Pocahontas inhabits "the twilight's dim perpetual throne" because she is the measure of time's measuring, the essence of temporality that is the body of the Continent. Relating "day and night" as the poet struggles to measure past and future, she incarnates the differences of the earth's language. She is the goddess of fertility (Ceres) as well as the perpetually unravished "virgin" bride, the ""well-featured but wanton yong girle' of the epigraph as well as a goddess of sheer nothingness:

High unto Labrador the sun strikes free
Her speechless dream of snow, and stirred again,
She is the torrent and the singing tree;
And she is virgin to the last of men . . .

These lines echo "North Labrador," in which the "eternal movement toward nothing represents the inhuman remorselessness of Nature"²⁵:

"Has no one come here to win you,
Or left you with the faintest blush
Upon your glittering breasts?
Have you no memories, O Darkly Bright?"

Coupled with Maquokeeta as well as with the "torrent and the singing tree," this cold goddess becomes part of nature's creative power. Crane's "glacier woman" is "squired" "down the sky" to run "the neighing canyons all the spring" as a fertility goddess: "She spouted arms; she rose with maize—to die." Leibowitz may consider Crane's images of cold northern climes as metaphors for nature's blindness to man, but for Crane this will to nothingness is the proper complement of nature's will to survive. Crane's cold goddess certainly betokens death as absolute, but also signifies the power of negation that man may employ creatively to forget the past in order to act or to lose himself and therefore to experience the wholeness of Being.

All the other women in The Bridge are measured in terms of Pocahontas' capacity to preserve the differential energy of nature. The mother's "Sabbatical, unconscious smile" "flickered through the snow screen" and "Did not return with the kiss in the hall." Here the coldness of the "snow screen" is associated with the smile that does "not return"; the mother is a reminder not only of the son's alienation from his family but from that history characterized by its evanescence and unfulfilled dreams. On the other hand, the goddess of the Continent gives of herself always anew in her seasonal and geographical variety:

Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates
With racetrack jargon,—dotting immensity
They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast
Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue—
Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west.

["The River"]

The poverty of the mother's love is measured against this bounty of the earth that always exceeds our desires, always escapes "the print that bound her name." The unrealized "Sabbatical, unconscious smile" of the mother in "Van Winkle" is redeemed in "Indiana" by "A homeless squaw," "passing on a stumbling jade." Everything about this squaw suggests the differences ennobled in Pocahontas by the poet but degraded by civilized man:

Perhaps a halfbreed. On her slender back
She cradled a babe's body, riding without rein.
Her eyes, strange for an Indian's, were not black
But sharp with pain
And like twin stars.

The mother's smile is almost brought to the son "only once, as I recall," but here the gesture of the pioneer woman, who holds up her son to this "halfbreed," is rewarded by "that smile across her shoulder" that "Will still endear her."

The eyes of these mythic women are compared often with the stars, a motif that is made even more explicit in "Southern Cross," in which the poet attempts to create his own image of creativity: "Eve—wraith of my unloved seed!" The "nameless Woman of the South," however, is part of the namelessness of God, whose very silence is known only in the various and conflicting interpretations to which it gives birth. Like the other lyrics in "Three Songs," "Southern Cross" explores the discrepancy between the ideal and the poet's false conception of that ideal.²⁶ As Thomas Vogler suggests: "The consummation the poet desires is doomed, even before he considers the problem of naming the woman, for she is apart, "High, cool, / wide from the slowly smoldering fire / Of lower heavens,—.' The distance and high coolness, can imply the separation between fallen man and Eve in the garden."²⁷ Yet in spite of the poet's false conception of her, the "woman" of "Southern Cross" recalls quite clearly the mythic complex of differences that Pocahontas represents. The Southern Cross is, of course, a star formation that aids navigators, and the poet employs this notion to metaphorize the Cross as a woman of both heaven and earth. The feminine principle of nature's creative energy is celebrated variously as "simian Venus, homeless Eve," fallen from her starry height only to be figured in the "long wake of phosphor, / iridescent / Furrow of all our travel" of the sea below, in which she is both violated and realized:

And the wash—
All night the water combed you with black
Insolence. You crept out shimmering,
accomplished.
Water rattled that stinging coil, your
Rehearsed hair—docile, alas, from many arms.

The "nameless woman of the South" is a composite of "Eve! Magdalene! / or Mary"; she is whore and virgin, sea-siren and "Madre María" of the "mantle's ageless blue," temporal woman and eternal goddess. Becoming visible only againstthe darkness of the night or the blackness of the sea, the starry light of this goddess accomplishes that confrontation of differences that is Crane's own aim as the conjugator of infinity's dim marge. If the poet in this song fails to preserve or even incarnate his vision, then he fails by virtue of his incapacity to accept the "illogic" of what is: the contradictions that define his muse. The poet confesses in the opening lines: "I wanted you, nameless Woman of the South, / No wraith, but utterly—as still more alone / The Southern Cross takes night / And lifts her girdles from her, one by one—/ High, cool, / wide from the slowly smoldering fire / Of lower heavens,—/ vaporous scars!"²⁸ The poet's desire for the utter possession of this nameless divinity implicates him in the modern technological urge for dominion over nature's energies. For Crane, the principle of divinity cannot be preserved in its heavenly height and coldness, but is realized only as it descends as "fire" and "blood" in the sea's "long wake of phosphor."²⁹

The two other songs suggest the ways in which the poet's desire "utterly" to possess the essential energy of nature reflects the modern age's burlesque of life. All the sexual imagery in "National Winter Garden" leads toward an empty consummation: "The world's one flagrant, sweating cinch." As the title of this poem suggests, this hot jazz world is in fact a cold and lifeless realm that only mimes the Dionysian intoxication of "The Dance." The purpose of this sexual rite is the destruction of proportions and relations: "legs waken salads in the brain" and the dancer, despite her glittering garb, is "whiter than snow" and reveals a "sandstone grey between." The climax of the dance is in fact a complete collapse that repudiates the rich vitality of sexuality it presumes to celebrate:

We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed,
—All but her belly buried in the floor;
And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!
We flee her spasm through a fleshless door. . . .

The music here is "A tom-tom scrimmage with a somewhere violin, / Some cheapest echo of them all—begins," which is hardly the jazz-poetry of the roof-top garden scene in "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen":

Where cuckoos clucked to finches
Above the deft catastrophes of drums.
While titters hailed the groans of death
Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen
The incunabula of the divine grotesque.
This music has a reassuring way.

In "Faustus and Helen," the jazz approximates the "measure-taking" of the poet, who enables us to confront death with a Chaplinesque pirouetting, an ecstasy of life that acknowledges change and mortality as the very resources of our intoxication. In "National Winter Garden," the dancer enables us to be "reborn" only by exposing to us the emptiness and futility of our desires for fulfillment that she represents:

Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh,
O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone.
Then you, the burlesque of our lust—and faith,
Lug us back lifeward—bone by infant bone.

"Virginia" burlesques the poet's desire for the divine, which in "Southern Cross" he can see in the phosphor wake only as a "fallen Eve." Trying to transmute the quotidian and meretricious world of the modern into the place of some renewed spirituality, the poet ends only by increasing the distance between the secular and divine. Once again, the poet frustrates and corrupts his vision by seeking to possess it totally, to "name" it: "O blue-eyed Mary with the claret scarf, / Saturday Mary, mine!" Degraded to an office girl mockingly adorned with the colors of heaven and earth, Crane's goddess is reduced to an object for the lust of the boss or the poet. By way of contrast, we might recall "The Dance," in which heaven's blue and earth's red are brought into an active relation: "Nowsnaps the flint in every tooth; red fangs / And splay tongues thinly busy the blue air." The image of the serpent snapping the air represents that "margin" or "between" of the earth and the sky that Crane seeks to determine. Brought into relation by the dance, the earth and the sky are only further divided in "Virginia": "O Mary, leaning from the high wheat tower, / Let down your golden hair" and "Out of the way-up nickel-dime tower shine, / Cathedral Mary, / shine!—." And yet this poem suggests a method whereby the poet might begin to "absorb" modern urban life in his larger mythic vision. Crane had a preference for the word "synergy," which is a medical term that describes the correlated action of different parts of the body to produce a complex movement. In this lyric, Crane extends his social criticism but also offers the reader a series of images that seem modern equivalents of the synergetic rhythms of "The Dance":

It's high carillon
From the popcorn bells!
Pigeons by the million—
And Spring in Prince Street
Where green figs gleam
By oyster shells!

The suggestive sexuality of the figs and oysters is complemented by the poetic contiguity of what is still ripening ("green figs") and what has been used ("oyster shells"). What is to come "gleams" only in relation to what has been, the imagistic coupling itself constituting the sexual potency of the present. The poet discovers a threshold of myth in the very "logic" of his metaphors, which begin to invade the city and displace modern man's sense of his contingent existence. The metropolitan god seems to be Chance—"Crap-shooting gangs in Bleecker reign,"³⁰ but the poet buries Chance in the luxuriant flowers of his own imaginative vision, which seems to initiate some renewed contact between man and nature:

High in the noon of May
On cornices of daffodils
The slender violets stray.
Crap-shooting gangs in Bleecker reign,
Peonies with pony manes—
Forget-me-nots at windowpanes. . . .

Thus Crane's goddess in The Bridge ought to be understood as the principle of differences, Dionysian energy, or synergos that is figured in the central symbol of the bridge itself.³¹ The double movement of the poem's imagery relies upon the differences between the past and the future, the earth/sea and heaven/sky, death and renewal that are the main thematic co-ordinates of the poem. Crane's aim is to employ this stylistic tension as a sort of subliminal reinforcement of his main argument. The present is not merely a vanishing moment in a progressive or regressive series of events; the present is not an experience that is recorded passively by the poet. The present is an architecture: an active measuring of the past in terms of the future as well as an appropriation of the monuments of the past and our desires for the future for use in the construction of a site for human dwelling. Crane criticizes the modern age for pursuing an historical course that is itself the destruction of "history" as the basis for man's spiritual dwelling on earth. As we have seen, everything in this modern world is a rush toward the satisfaction of desire, the collapsing of distances, and the annihilation of nature. The poet implicates himself in this desperate desire to escape life and deny the differences whereby he is constituted. Man's desire to "possess" the "nameless" reveals his hatred of life in his struggle to arrest the perpetual metamorphoses whereby "living" as such is preserved.

In similar terms, Heidegger distinguishes the building that enables man to reveal his own nature and destiny as the one who dwells on the earth from mere construction for its own sake. The engineering of commercial bridges for mere movement and transport aims secretly at the destruction of space and the obliteration of boundaries. There is an ironic "bridge" of telecommunication wires in "The River": "The last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas / Loped under wires that span the mountain stream. / Keen instruments, strung to a vastprecision / Bind town to town and dream to ticking dream." For Crane and Heidegger, however, the poetic bridge involves that constructive act in which space, as both ontological and historical, achieves its proper dimensions:

Only things that are locations in this manner allow for spaces. What the word for space, Raum, Rum, designates is said by its ancient meaning. Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement or lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presenting. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their being from locations and not from "space. "³²

For Crane, the old Quaker Meeting House established such a space of human dwelling, but as "the New Avalon Hotel" that spiritual space becomes a metaphor for modern man's perpetual homelessness in what Henry James termed this "hotel-civilization":

This was the Promised Land, and still it is
To the persuasive suburban land agent
In bootleg roadhouses where the gin fizz
Bubbles in time to Hollywood's new love-nest
pageant.
Fresh from the radio in the old Meeting House
(Now the New Avalon Hotel) volcanoes roar
A welcome to highsteppers that no mouse
Who saw the Friends there ever heard before.

Thus the poet descends in "The Tunnel" to an underground world in which this modern frenzy is reduced to an infernal "unity": "The monotone / of motion is the sound / of other faces, also underground—." Repeating the strains of the 20th-century Limited, the subway train objectifies what modern America has been accomplishing: the denial of the earth and man's life in it. The Daemonic force of the modern age intends the very destruction of time: "the muffled slaughter of a day in birth—/ O cruelly to inoculate the brinking dawn / With antennae toward worlds that glow and sink;—." One must be careful in reading these extremely condensed lines to follow Crane's poetic logic or else mistake the syntactic subject or antecedent. Vogler reads these lines in terms of the poet's desire for vision: "His vision of "worlds that glow and sink' is balanced on a "brinking dawn' that can never become full day."³³ But the agent of this stanza is the Daemon of the subway, a sort of infernal Underpower. This Daemon "inoculates" the "brinking dawn," which in the natural world measures diurnal time, with "antennae toward worlds that glow and sink." Crane plays upon the root of the verb "inoculate," in (in) + oculus (eye), perhaps to suggest the Cyclopean eye of the subway train as a sort of surrogate sun. "Inoculation" is also a botanical term for the engrafting of an eye or bud from one plant to another. The poet has been moving toward an imaginative mode of appropriation whereby he might "graft" the objects of the urban world back onto the natural, organic stalk; but in the subway, he himself tracks the inverted appropriation of nature by this technological culture. The "day in birth" illuminates only the decline of the West: "worlds that glow and sink."

The Daemon of "The Tunnel" subordinates the life of this subterranean antiterra to its own blind will:

O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,
Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;
Condensed, thou takest all—shrill ganglia
Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.

Ironically anticipating the concluding lines of this section, in which the spiritual gathering of the Logos is invoked, this Daemon gathers the "kiss of our agony" only to "condense" it unto itself, a nerve center ("shrill ganglia") driven by its own destructive force. The resurrection of the poet from this world is expressed in images that begin to restore the proportions and boundaries of the natural world:

And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,
The sod and billow breaking,—lifting ground,
—A sound of waters bending astride the sky
Unceasing with some Word that will not die .. . !

The poet himself intones a song that displaces the nervous tremors of the subway's noise and that we cannot fail to keep, because it is in its very nature "some Word that will not die." The world to which he returns still remains inverted, but he has initiated his return by establishing the familiar loci of natural energies: the sod of the prairies, the billows of the sea, the sky of the divine, and the language that binds men to these elements.

Everything in The Bridge is defined in relation to the central figuration of the bridge itself as the "measuretaking" of human beings and Being. Most critics read the "Atlantis" of the poem to be a sort of fictive ideal that governs the human voyage in a world that has lost any contact with true divinity. Unquestionably, Crane himself is driven by this desire for an impossible consummation and to create some "nameless" presence in which all things would be reconciled. Yet like Poe in Eureka, Crane recognizes that such divinity may be known only in its dispersed variety and that the purity of the "white, pervasive Paradigm" in itself is merely a cold abstraction.³⁴ Crane introduces "Atlantis" with a passage from Plato that suggests "harmony and system" might govern ideally the dissonance of temporal life, but Crane himself makes this Platonic vision of perfection serve man's tragic agon. The "bridge" of "Atlantis" mocks abstract idealism with Nietzschean discords: "In order to understand the difficult phenomenon of Dionysiac art directly, we must now attend to the supreme significance of musical dissonance. The delight created by tragic myth has the same origin as the delight dissonance in music creates. The primal Dionysiac delight, experienced even in the presence of pain, is the source common to both music and tragic myth."³⁵ Nietzsche argues that the "anti-Dionysiac" artist "tried to resolve the tragic dissonance" and thus followed the scientific faith "that the world can be corrected through knowledge and that life should be guided by science; that it is actually in a position to confine man within the narrow circle of soluble tasks, where he can say cheerfully to life: 'I want you. You are worth knowing.'³⁶ We have already seen how such a theory of knowledge as possession represents the will to destruction that characterizes the modern age.

Giving up the desire to "represent" or "understand" the divine energy that pervades all things but which in itself remains a nameless abstraction, Crane turns instead to the poetic "performance" wherein Being is enabled to "speak" in and through men.³⁷ The dissonance of the performance expresses the living and present man in his radical becoming: not man's anxious and passive submission to the fleeting moment but his willful participation in life's creative energy. What speaks through man also speaks in nature; it is language, but not merely the words of homo faber. What speaks is the nature of language, the creative principle that remains in itself nameless only to appear in its various avatars: Dionysus, Woman, Will, Sea, Dance, Bridge. The creative energy that is given poetic voice in The Bridge is thus never reducible to a single name; it endures by virtue of its transformations and manifests itself in its very dismemberment. As Heidegger writes: "Because man is, in his enduring dimension, his being must now and again be measured out. That requires a measure which involves at once the whole dimension in one. To discern this measure, to gauge it as the measure, and to accept it as the measure, means for the poet to make poetry. Poetry is this measure-taking—its taking, indeed, for the dwelling of man."³⁸ Poetry affirms the enduring in man's being by commanding the repeated measure-taking whereby man's being is made to appear. Crane begins his poem with the clear aim of establishing or recovering that which is enduring in human nature: "a myth to God," "Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars," "condense eternity." But what endures is finally the bridge that actively measures the relations of life and death, beings and Being, time and eternity.

Like Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence, Crane's bridge affirms life's creative energy in its manifold differences as that which endures and recurs. As Heidegger reads Nietzsche: "Eternal Recurrence is the inexhaustible fullness of joyful-painful life."³⁹ We have argued that Crane attacks modern America for its secret aversion to time, for its desire to escape the transience of the present in lust for the future or nostalgia for the past. Thus Crane's modern characters are never "timely," but always "too late" or "too early." The Bridge is "unhistorical" in its effort to "forget" the historical burden that compels man to hate his own existence; The Bridge is "super-historical" in its effort to affirm human and natural transience as that radical becoming "which gives existence an eternal and stable character." This is precisely what the "hypothesis" of Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence offers man as a joyful wisdom.⁴⁰ Heidegger's reading is again useful: "This yes to time is the will that would have transience abide, would not have it degraded to nihility. But how can transience abide? Only in such a way that, as transience, it does not just constantly pass, but always comes to be. It would abide only in such a way that transience and what ceases to be return as the selfsame in its coming."⁴¹ The "failure" of Crane's vision in The Bridge has been stressed by critics who cannot untangle the man's biography from his poetic aims. The anxiety of the poem is inescapable, but it functions as the other pole of the joyous intoxication that syncopates the dissonance. Crane wrote to Seiden Rodman: "The poem, as a whole, is, I think, an affirmation of experience, and to that extent is "positive' rather than "negative' in the sense that The Waste Land is negative."⁴²The Bridge is an effort to affirm experience and discover within man's temporal environment the creative resource that would redeem us from our homeless longing for some desert Belle Isle.

Joseph Riddel has suggested that the poem's very structure and movement express something akin to Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence. Although he emphasizes the anguish of the poet's necessary repetitions, Riddel recognizes that Crane wants to transform "history's incessant motion into the myth of an on-going cycle, realized through the voice of the Dionysian self. Crane indicates, thereby, that the cycle (and history) is manifest only in the coming and going of the individual self—the poet as word and as flesh, the poet as sufferer returned again and again to the deathly landscape of history's changes and the perfidies attendant upon his role as the keeper of the Word, the ground of being."⁴³ In "Atlantis," the bridge itself becomes a hieroglyph whose "reading" now and again constitutes the visionary act of poetry. The "inviolate curve" of the "seagull's wings" in "To Brooklyn Bridge" is associated at the end with the "eyes" of the poet and reader:

Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls stung with rime—
Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light—
Pick biting way up towering looms that press
Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade
—Tomorrows into yesteryear—and link
What cipher-script of time no traveller reads
But who, through smoking pyres of love and
death,
Searches the timeless laugh of mythic spears.

Crane's imagery stresses the violation of the "inviolate curve" by relying on such words as "stung," "slit," "fins," "pick biting way," "blade on tendon blade." The violation of the pure white Paradigm is the very process of the poem and the act that resituates the Ideal within the transience of the world. The bridge thus leads us "from time's realm" only to return us more fully to time; the bridge is that measure of the "between" wherein time and space achieve their natures. The "Everpresence, beyond time" is the creative energy that endures only within the movements of human time and that is manifest only in the dissonance of its Word as words. The poet knows the "Cathay" that marks the end of voyaging has been displaced by Atlantis, the "between" of the bridge, that measures man's voyaging as his proper site, his true dwelling on the earth:

Is it Cathay,
Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring
The serpent with the eagle in the leaves... ?
Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.

Zarathustra's own image for the wisdom of Eternal Recurrence—the eagle with the serpent—replaces the original dream of Cathay.⁴⁴ And in Crane's last words, the dissonant method of the poem is condensed as the final symbol of the vernal bridge.

Critics frequently conclude that Crane expresses in The Bridge a desire for mythic vision that is never achieved and by its nature unrealizable. Yet, The Bridge does achieve its "vision" of the divine repeatedly, but systematically dismantles its epiphanies in order to repeat and renew them. Each of the individual poems has its visionary moment, although few achieve the ecstatic intoxication of "The Dance" or the incantatory enthusiasm of "Ave Maria." Yet even in those poems that seem most concerned with modern America's corruptions, such as "National Winter Garden" or "The Tunnel," there are moments in which negativity is transformed into poetic knowledge and insight. Each poem enacts the dissonance that governs the entire work, repeating not only key images and themes but also recalling the differential energy that governs man's being. As Riddel argues: "Crane's long poems do not develop, they recur. They pivot upon the external event, which the poet is constantly reliving. The persona of The Bridge is no protagonist, is involved in no agon except the recurrent event of his quest and failure."⁴⁵ Viewed in this way, Crane's "epic" differs fundamentally from those long poems that rely on a progressive, episodic structure to direct the educational process of a protagonsit or hero. "Atlantis" is neither the telos of the poem nor the poet's final confession of defeat and yearning, but the dissonant chord in which the dance of the poem is made to endure in its repetition.

¹ Quotations from Crane's poetry are made from The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Hart Crane, cd. Brom Weber (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1966), unless indicated otherwise in the notes.

² Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 152.

³ This view inverts Brom Weber's reading of Atlantis and Cathay in Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study (New York: The Bodley Press, 1948), p. 377: "Atlantis, like Cathay, is an ideal. But whereas Cathay is for us an unsullied symbol, Atlantis is a symbol of the triumph of the material over the spirit. The juxtaposition of these two ideals leads to a transference of the fuller implications of Atlantis to Cathay."

⁴ Crane wrote to Waldo Frank, The Letters of Hart Crane: 1916-1932, ed. Brom Weber (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1952), p. 261: "The bridge as a symbol today has no significance beyond an economic approach to shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism and toothpicks."

⁵ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 19567), #461, pp. 253-54. Nietzsche offers many similar outbursts against this "priestly" abnegation of life throughout his writings.

⁶ "Modern Poetry," in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters, p. 262.

⁷ Ibid., p. 263.

⁸Letters of Hart Crane, p. 260.

⁹ Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?" in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 101.

¹⁰ Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1956), p. 23.

¹¹ Among others, see Brom Weber, Hart Crane, p. 325: "Yet history and science were the two most important ingredients in a project which united past and present, ideas with machinery. Because he was unable to cope with these subjects, The Bridge was fated to fall to pieces as an organic structure."

¹² Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1957), pp. 6-7.

¹³ "Modern Poetry," p. 260.

¹⁴ As Crane explained "Powhatan's Daughter" to Otto Kahn, Letters of Hart Crane, p. 305: "It seemed altogether ineffective from the poetic standpoint to approach this material from the purely chronological angle. . . . One can get that viewpoint in any history primer. What I am after is an assimilation of this experience, a more organic panorama, showing the continuous and living evidence of the past in the inmost vital substance of the present."

¹⁵The Use and Abuse of History, p. 42.

¹⁶ Crane's emphasis on the body and affective response recalls Nietzsche's repeated insistence that we return to "biology" as the extra-moral base for values. For example, see The Will to Power, # 532, p. 289; "Essential: to start from the body and employ it as a guide. It is the much richer phenomenon, which allows of clearer observation. Belief in the body is better established than belief in the spirit."

¹⁷ "Modern Poetry," p. 262. See also Crane's letter to Gorham Munson, Letters of Hart Crane, p. 125: "And I am even more grateful for your very rich suggestions best stated in your Frank Study on the treatment of mechanical manifestations of today as subject for lyrical, dramatic, and even epic poetry. You must already notice that influence in "F and H.' It is to figure even larger in The Bridge. The field of possibilities literally glitters all around one with the perception and vocabulary to pick out significant details and digest them into something emotional."

¹⁸ "Modern Poetry," p. 262.

¹⁹ William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), pp. 105, 120.

²⁰ Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), p. 110.

²¹ Emerson, "The Poet," in Essays, Second Series, vol. Ill in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 14 vols. (Boston, Mass.: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1883), p. 29: "The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?"

²² See Joseph Riddel, "Hart Crane's Poetics of Failure," ELH, 33 (1966), 486: "Like Dionysus, the poet must not possess but be possessed, and realize himself in losing himself."

²³Birth of Tragedy, p. 24.

²⁴ Letter to Otto Kahn, Letters of Hart Crane, p. 307.

²⁵ Herbert Leibowitz, Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968), p. 32.

²⁶ Samuel Hazo, Hart Crane: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1963), p. 106, interprets the personification of Southern Cross as the ""bride' of 'The Dance' degraded to "an anonymous prostitute who "liftsher girdles from her, one by one,' until the poet's "mind is churned to spittle, whispering hell.' Actually, the antecedent of "her" in the poem is "night," not "The Southern Cross." The rising of the Southern Cross "lifts" the night's "girdles," as if this starry illumination were a liberation of the night from utter obscurity. Hazo is properly sensitive to the sexual suggestiveness of girdles being lifted, but "Southern Cross" is a "prostitute" in this poem only insofar as "she" is made to serve the transcendental ideals of the poet, who wants her "utterly" and "as still more alone" as well as "High, cool."

²⁷ Thomas Vogler, Preludes to Vision: The Epic Venture in Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Hart Crane (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), p. 177.

²⁸ Crane's association of his lost desire with the rising of the Southern Cross recalls Melville's "Crossing the Tropics," in which the sailor/poet recalls his bride at home in a similar fashion:

While now the Pole Star sinks from sight
The Southern Cross it climbs the sky;
But losing thee, my love, my light,
O bride but for one bridal night,
The loss no rising joys supply.

In the last lines, the poet suggests that his wandering and desire have condemned him to a sort of eternal limbo:

O love, O love, these oceans vast:
Love, love, it is as death were past!

From Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago, 111.: Hendricks House, 1947), p. 202.

²⁹ Crane suggests this quite clearly in the seventh poem in Ten Unpublished Poems (New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1972), n. p.:

I rob my breast to reach those altitudes—
Abstractions to meet the meaningless concussion
of
Pure heights—Infinity resides below . . .
The obelisk of plain infinity founders below
My vision is a grandiose dilemma.

³⁰ The "Crap-shooting gangs" echo the lines in "At Melville's Tomb":

The dice of drowned men's bones he saw
bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

See Crane's commentary on these lines in his letter to Harriet Monroe, in Complete Poems and Selected Letters, p. 238: "These being the bones of dead men who never completed their voyage, it seems legitimate to refer to them as the only surviving evidence of certain messages undelivered, mute evidence of certain things, experiences that the dead mariners might have had to deliver. Dice as a symbol of chance and circumstance is also implied." Is this modern Manhattan composed of the scattered shards of the message Columbus failed to deliver?

³¹ This reading of the differential structure of Crane's "Woman" explores only one such image-motif in the poem. Many other recurrent images in the poem follow a similar pattern, which is also evident in Crane's other poems. Riddel discusses such dualisms as Dionysus/ Christ as reflections of such basic psychic differences as id/ego. His discussion of Crane's use of the serpent is exemplary: "Moreover, the complex associations of the immortal serpent, the sexual serpent, the serpent of intellect and time, and the serpentine dance of Dionysus begin to accumulate upon the double vision of the sacrificial and the generative act" (p. 488).

³² Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," p. 154.

³³ Vogler, p. 190.

³⁴ Riddel, p. 483: "The poem aspires toward the tranquillity and silence of "belle isle' (monistic union), but the language ironically will not let go, and ultimately disdains the end in which it would consume itself."

³⁵Birth of Tragedy, p. 143.

³⁶ Ibid., pp. 107, 108.

³⁷ See Birth of Tragedy, p. 55: "We all talk about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be indifferent poets. At bottom the esthetic phenomenon is quite simple: all one needs in order to be a poet is the ability to have a lively action going on before one continually, to live surrounded by hosts of spirits. To be a dramatist all one needs is the urge to transform oneself and speak out of strange bodies and souls." Riddel, p. 483, argues that Crane's poem "achieves, or seeks to, an intensity of rhythm and movement that overrides intellect and purifies it."

³⁸ Heidegger, "" . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . "" in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 223-24.

³⁹ Heidegger, "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" trans. Bernd Magnus, in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1977), p. 69.

⁴⁰ Nietzsche's clearest exposition of Eternal Recurrence is given in The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), especially # 341, pp. 273-74. Nietzsche poses the eternal return of the same as an hypothetical question designed to elicit man's affirmation or negation of life; he does not offer the concept as a "theory of history," as many commentators have suggested: "What, if some day or night a daemon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speak of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'

⁴¹ Heidegger, "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?," p. 74.

⁴²Letters of Hart Crane, p. 351.

⁴³ Riddel, p. 492.

⁴⁴ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), p. 137.

⁴⁵ Riddel, p. 482.