SOURCE: "A Divided Self: The Poetic Responsibility of Hart Crane with Respect to 'The Bridge '," in Modernist Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1979, pp. 3-18.

[In the following essay, Schwartz explains the fragmentation of The Bridge by discussing the ways in which Crane's temperament and training were actually unsuitable to the writing of such a poem.]

I would like to consider the question of how Hart Crane came to think of himselfas the kind of poet who could undertake the composition of The Bridge By temperament, education, and heritage Crane was the worst equipped of poets to undertake an exhaustive meditation upon the nature of the modern with its implications of a maturing technological culture. Constitutionally unable to apprehend the world as a whole, he had no enthusiasm for cosmic poetic designs or programs. He was expressive not topical by nature. Yet he found himself gradually being cast (and casting himself) in the role of Walt Whitman's successor. How this came to happen remains an essential question for the reader of his enormous, fragmented poem. Considering this question will make us better able to appreciate the essential indecision of the poet, and it may help explain the vacillation between poetic and rhetoric in the poem itself. Largely because of the strength of its parts, The Bridge remains one of the most significant literary efforts thus far to come to terms with modernism; it stands as a magnificent and instructive wreck on the path of one's progress toward an understanding of our age.

My concern, however, is directly with Crane's divided self rather than with the poem. My effort will be to trace how the divided self came about. My thesis is simply that Crane was essentially one kind of poet and that he tried, because of a variety of pressures, to become another kind of poet. He did not slowly evolve or mature or change—all words conventionally used to describe the development of writers. He undertook a willful arbitrary shift; he was uncomfortable with it, and he did not persist in it.¹ It will be necessary first of all to sketch briefly the essential poetic sensibility of Crane, a point easily documented. Then, at more length, I would like to come to grips directly with the question of how he came to think of himself as Whitman's heir.

Allen Tate has perceptively particularized the essential character of Crane's poetic sensibility, and it is a good place to begin: "locked-in sensibility" and "insulated egoism." Crane's derangement and disorder, in contrast to that of Rimbaud, was original and fundamental. It is Tate's view that Rimbaud cultivated derangement, working at achieving disorder within the context of a milieu in which an implicit order still existed. He struggled against the intellectual order he inherited. By Crane's time, the derangement of the intellectual systems of modernism had already taken place, and he had to struggle with the problem of finding some principle of order. For Crane, disorder was natural and fundamental; his poetic perception of this condition marks "the special quality of his mind that belongs particularly to our time."² Although the romantic cosmology of The Bridge made Crane a symbol of the apotheosis of the romantic spirit in our century, essentially his romanticism was not at all cosmic in its outreach, but personal and lyric, characterized by the richest intensity, best sustained, if at all, in short stabs at the feel of things—the poems in White Buildings and many of the individual parts of The Bridge "I write damned little because I am interested in recording certain sensations, very rigidly chosen, with an eye for what according to my taste and sum of prejudices seem suitable to—or intense enough—for verse."³ "God save me from a Messianic predisposition!" (To Herbert Weinstock, April 22, 1930). His tortured diction, private imagery, and personal habit of metaphor, in such vivid contrast to Whitman's simple rhetorical speaking-out, were essential to the character of his poetic mind. Crane was aware of this bent both before and after he had completed The Bridge. He complained to Tate about critics who were not looking for poetry, but for some grand design. "They are . .. in pursuit of some cure-all." Poetry is truer to itself when it does not attempt to sum up the universe. Crane admitted that he was unable to write such verse: "My vision of poetry is too personal to "answer the call.' And if I ever write any more verse it will probably be at least as personal as the idiom of White Buildings whether anyone cares to look at it or not" (To Allen Tate, July 13, 1930). Three letters should be considered here to better understand Crane's perception of himself as "too personal," the standard by which other influences must be judged.

After Gorham Munson wrote "Hart Crane: Young Titan in the Sacred Wood," an essay on Crane in which he decreed a social and speculative function for the poet, and wanted poetry to have the character of philosophy (or science), Crane objected: "Poetry .. . is simply the concrete evidence of experience of a recognition (knowledge if you like). It can give you a ratio of fact and experience, and in this sense it is both perception and thing perceived, according as it approaches a significant articulation or not. This is its reality, its fact, being." He accused Munson of wanting some kind of exact ethical formula or moral classification for poetry and insisted that this goal made poetry subordinate to science or philosophy. While Crane asserted that he was not opposing any new synthesis that would provide a consistent philosophical and moral approach for his time, he maintained that he was not attempting through poetry to delineate any such system. ("My vision of poetry is too personal to "answer the call.') Do not propose a goal "for me which I have no idea of nor interest in following. Either you find my work poetic or not, but if you propose for it such ends as poetry organically escapes, it seems to me as Allen [Tate] said, that you as a critic of literature are working into a confusion of categories" (March 17,1926).

In a letter to Yvor Winters Crane made a related point. Winters had articulated the theory of the poet as the complete man, using this theory to point out inadequacies in Crane's work. Crane referred to Munson and other of his friends who had been "stricken with the same urge"—an urge for a grand design—and they had "rushed into the portals of the famous Gurdjieff Institute and have since put themselves through all sorts of hindu antics, songs, dances, incantations, psychic sessions, etc., so that now, presumably the left lobes of their brains and the right lobes respectively function .. . in perfect unison." Crane explained that he could not become enthusiastic about their methods, but was careful to indicate that he was not identifying Winters' advice with their practice. He insisted, however, that he did not aspire toward the "rather classical characteristics that you cite as desirable" for the poet. "This is not to say that I don't "envy' the man who attains them, but rather that I have long since abandoned that field—and I doubt if I were ever born to achieve . . . those richer syntheses of consciousness that we both agree in classing as supreme, at least the attitude of a Shakespeare or a Chaucer is not mine by organic rights, and why try to fool myself that I possess that type of vision when I obviously do not!" He begged not to be credited with ambitions that he did not have. He insisted that he would try to develop as poet but that he could not develop into the kind of poet Winters praised, using the method which Winters recommended. The letter is a passionate outburst of a highly personalistic poet who had no metaphysical base on which to rest and did not much care. "If you knew how little a metaphysician I am in a scholastic sense of the term, you would scarcely attribute such a conscious method to my poems .. . as you do. I am an utter ignoramus in that whole subject, have never read Kant, Descartes or other doctors. It's all an accident as far as my style goes" (May 29, 1927).

The third letter, to Isidor Schneider, reinforces the point. He laments the fact that he does not have the scientific and metaphysical training to appreciate and judge the encyclopedias of the future by Whitehead, Bradley, and Wyndham Lewis. The only one he had been able to understand was Spengler. They were too formidable for him to master because of their statistics, allusions, threats, and labyrinth of abstractions. He would give them up in defense of his own writing, since

all they really net me is a constant paralysis and distraction. I think this unmitigated concern with the future is one of the most discouraging symptoms of the chaos of our age, however worthy the ethical concerns may be. It seems as though the imagination has ceased all attempts at any creative activity—and had become simply a great bulging eye ogling the foetus of the next century (March 29, 1928).⁴

This letter to Schneider, like the one to Winters, is especially interesting because Crane was under great pressure at this time to construct some grand design to give order, form, and authority to the still incomplete Bridge.

It is, thus, easy to understand why Crane's romanticism could find suitable expression only in the intense lyrics which were his highly personal response to the chaos that reality seemed to be. Commencing with his shattered sense of family, the normal props that lead to security and synthesis were unavailable tohim. No significant coherent religious view of things was offered to him, a deficiency especially important to remember for a poet who had a profound religious need. Further, he had no education to speak of—that is, the kind of education a poet making a major attempt at synthesis would have to have. This is what Allen Tate meant when he described Crane as one of the most ignorant men he ever knew. His letters show that though he read widely, he read impulsively and only along the narrow avenues he himself picked out. The reading, for example, that he did to provide himself with background for the historical motifs of The Bridge was improvised at best. Frederick Hoffman's point is worth repeating: "He had no acquaintance with a systematic body of knowledge through which his tentative convictions could be translated."⁵ "The tragic quandry (or agon) of the modern world," Crane wrote to Munson, "derives from the paradoxes that an inadequate system of rationality forces on the living consciousness." He disavowed any attempt "through poetry to delineate any such system" (March 17, 1926). He did not have, and he seemed not to want to have, the poise one would need to look at things steadily and whole, to keep anxiety and turbulence under that tense control needed by the speculative poet. Rather, he used his anxiety and turbulence as fuel for the creation of a certain kind of lyric. We know from Philip Horton's biography that Crane was so highly impressed with the following passage from Plato's The Ion that he marked it with red in his copy.

For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. . . . Lyric poets are not in their right minds when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and meter they are inspired and possessed. . . .

A passage from The Phaedrus, also heavily underscored by Crane, is likewise to the point. It is Socrates' observation that the poet who is not possessed by madness is no poet, that the poetry of sane men "is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen." Early in his career, sporadically thereafter, and ultimately, he believed his mission as a poet was to celebrate his personal consciousness of some undefined absolute which he thought he apprehended in rare moments of poetic consciousness. Locked in his own sensibility, Crane used the fragmented character of reality as the "splendid waste" out of which he fashioned his ecstatic lyric cries moment by moment (when the moment was right).

The division in Crane's poetic sensibility came about when one group of his friends encouraged him to invent a form of experience—a grand design, a system, a synthesis of consciousness—that would give comprehensive meaning to an otherwise fragmented and chaotic reality through a programmatic scheme. The destructive tension between these competing views of his function divided his energies and was responsible, in part, for his agonizing life as a poet from the time he first conceived the idea of The Bridge until it was finally published.

The most influential of this group of friends was Waldo Frank. Although Crane had known Gorham Munson for some time, and although the influence of Frank and Munson became somewhat intertwined in its impact upon Crane, it was not until the correspondence with Frank and the meeting with him that the ideas about to be considered started to take serious hold of him.⁶ In 1922 he had written scornfully to Munson, "will radios, flying machines, and cinemas have such a great effect on poetry in the end?" (April 19, 1922). Approximately one year later he was saying (again to Munson): "the more I think about my Bridge poem the more thrilling its symbolic possibilities become, and since my reading of you and Frank .. . I begin to feel myself directly connected with Whitman. I feel myself in currents that are positively awesome in their extent and possibilities. .. . "H e was excited by these new possibilities, since the modern artist most needs vision to go along with his gigantic assimilative capacity. He had lost the shreds of philosophical pessimism and felt himself fit to become "a suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age" (March 2, 1923). The influence of Waldo Frank had begun to make itself felt.

When Crane first read Our America in 1919 he thought it pessimistic, and was bothered by Frank's "extreme national consciousness." He felt in contrast to Frank that writers succeeded because of their "natural unconsciousness combinedwith great sensitiveness." Frank's "thoroughly logical or propagandist" mind annoyed him. Yet, he noted that Frank had hit the truth many time (To Gorham Munson, December 13, 1919). Though the book was too rhapsodical and a bit "pathetic," there was meat in it and it was stimulating (To Gorham Munson, December 27, 1919). Frank's comments cannot be ignored (To Gorham Munson, March 6, 1920). After reading Rahab, he thought Frank a real artist, except for the slight touch of sentimentality to his mysticism, sincere, and "certainly in the front line" (To Gorham Munson, August-September, 1922).⁷

In the summer of 1922 Munson was completing his study of the novels of Waldo Frank, Crane worked on a jacket blurb for Munson's book, and planned to write a short review of it for the Double Dealer. He became closely acquainted with Frank's ideas and with Munson's analysis of them. In the fall of 1922 he read Frank's short story "Hope" in Secession and found it "so fine" that he could not keep from writing him an enthusiastic letter of extravagant praise. About a month later Frank commented on "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" in the most flattering terms in his reply to Crane. Crane's subsequent letter in (February 27, 1923) is almost ecstatically appreciative of Frank's notice.

It is a new feeling and a glorious one, to have one's inmost delicate intentions so fully recognized as your last letter to me attested. .. . I am certain that a number of us at last have some kind of community of interests . . . something better than a mere clique. It is a consciousness of something more vital than stylistic questions and "taste," it is a vision, and a vision alone that not only America needs, but the whole world.

Crane then asked Munson to set up a meeting with Frank; Munson arranged a luncheon when Crane came to New York in the spring of 1923. After this first meeting Crane wrote to Frank that "yours is the most vital consciousness in America and that potentially I have responses which might prove interesting, even valuable to us both" (Easter 1923). Just before this meeting with Frank, Crane had written to Charmion Weigand, "I cry for a positive attitude!" (January 30, 1923).

Frank did offer a positive attitude made up of many strands consciously worked into a systemic program, but many of the strands had been available to Crane from others: Munson, Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, Plato, Nietzsche, P. D. Ouspensky, and Whitman. Perhaps it is impossible to determine finally why Frank in particular was such a catalyst for Crane. It may have been personal charisma of some kind. Frank was influential in a way quite different from Tate, Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, or others who might have been expected to fill this role. "I'm glad to know that The Bridge is fulfilling your utmost intuitions; for an intuition it undoubtedly was. . . . What I should have done without your love and most distinguished understanding is hard to say, but there is no earthly benefit for which I would exchange it" (To Waldo Frank, August 19, 1926). Crane might have been speaking of Frank's poem, or better of an agreement they might have had that Frank mined the ore while Crane shaped it. Crane quarreled with almost all of his friends, at times bitterly; he never quarreled with Frank.⁸ He was of course flattered by Frank's attention, since Frank was already a well-respected intellectual and the author of four novels. His earnest Americanism, his strong emphasis on the significance of Whitman, especially the Democratic Vistas, his belief that American poets were meant to be makers of myth and pioneers of the spirit, and his Ouspensky-like "mysticism" represented a combination of qualities, some of which had previously engaged Crane's own interest. Whatever the causes, it was Frank principally who influenced Crane to see the incipient The Bridge as a vehicle for the expression of some grand design. Although the "vision" which Crane had described to Frank was never eliminated from the poem, it now had to share the poem with something more systematic than Crane had ever tried before and in which he did not maintain a sustained interest. The "vision" would be extensively modified by the "thoroughly logical and propagandistic" mind of Waldo Frank.

Frank was much more inclined than Crane to be systematic; he had come home from Europe determined to formulate some grand design, guided in part by the work of Anatole France. Western civilization was in a near-chaotic state of irreversibledecline. This condition, however, was a sign that a rebirth of culture would begin in the soil of the new world. Since Frank was committed to the creation of a grand design, and since he had such a strong view of the necessity for the improvement of life that this design could bring, he gave prime attention to the role of the poet as the voice through which this system would be given articulation. The social function of the poet became preeminent; his energies must become Whitmanian in the service of mankind. He was able finally to accept the machine, integrating it into his system but less crudely than Munson suggested in Waldo Frank, A Study. Just as primitive man had to undergo a profound psychological revolution in learning that a simple tool could be an extension of his personal will, so too man in a machine culture would have to learn that the machine adumbrated the will of the age. The elements of life contained in the machine must be fused into a higher synthesis. In this way the mechanized world could express man's joy and pride.⁹

For Frank, Whitman was of singular significance, perhaps even the cornerstone upon which the design could be built. Above all writers, Whitman had a sense of the cosmic whole; he naturalized it in his poetry by showing an organic connection between inner vision and external reality. And in Democratic Vistas he had given scope to his ideas of human brotherhood, modern democracy, and vigourous individualism as the principal impulses of a new organic American culture which rejected the old values of the European past. Whitman found the materials for a new culture in his univocal mystic vision. He saw in American history a "new order of consciousness" which pointed toward a purposeful evolution which was no longer dualistic but integrated.¹⁰ Frank, following the example of Whitman, rejected both transcendentalism and materialism ("The Modern Distemper"), accepting the unity of spirit and matter only. The poet must be prophet and mystic in bringing this message to his time. National self-consciousness, created by the poet, is the beginning of greatness. When Crane wrote "Modern Poetry" (1930), he was using Frank's ideas and vocabulary. "[Whitman] better than any other was able to coordinate those forces in America that seem most intractable, fusing them into a universal vision which takes on an additional significance as times go on." Whitman, it seems, became for Frank the "great bulging eye ogling the foetus of the next century."

Crane was ready for Frank's design: "I cry for a positive attitude!" It brought many things of interest to Crane into a seemingly respectable intellectual whole. Whereas Crane was confused by competing philosophies and would remain essentially so, Frank was boldly putting them together. He convinced Crane of the validity of a myth of America, understood in Whitman's terms as assimilating the full extent of modernism, which we can fairly call our technological culture." Frank was formulating an aesthetic and a mysticism that would embrace the machine age. After a period of despair over the condition of modern life, he began to rediscover the American dream especially in terms of the scientific achievement of the machine age.¹² On the other hand, Crane, somewhat influenced by P. D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum, had profoundly doubted the ideal of progress in the material order.¹³ Ouspensky's dreary prose highlighted certain ideas (borrowed from William James) which Crane found corroborative "of several experiences in consciousness that I have had" and undoubtedly corroborative of what he had already discovered in Blake and some others (To Allen Tate, February 15, 1923). Humanity was decaying spiritually under the onslaught of scientific materialism. A new order of consciousness was the hope of the future. Ultimate realities in the noumenal world will be realized by the pure intuitive consciousness of the mind itself. Since poetry is the most effective means of revealing these spiritual realities, the poet must be a visionary. Now, however, inspired by Whitman and Waldo Frank to a new belief in the potentialities of America, he laid Ouspensky's pseudo-mysticism over the accomplishments of the modern world in an attempt to get at what Whitman had been celebrating earlier. For a moment, then, he seemed to have reconciled the ideal and the real, the flesh and the spirit.¹⁴ He would shape experience outside his consciousness according to the possibility of the new "spiritual values" offered by Frank.

Crane addressed himself directly and at length to the problem of poetry and the machine age in his essay "Modern Poetry." The machine, firmly entrenched in modern life, has produced challenging responsibilities for the poet. Poetry willfail its contemporary function if it cannot "acclimatize" it naturally. The poet must have the capacity to surrender temporarily "to the sensations of urban life." Science has now become the "uncanonized deity of the times"—one of the "fundamental factors" of our time along with the machine, as important to the modern poet as religion had been to Dante and Milton. As a result, Whitman had become the most "typical and valid expression of the American psychosis" because he was able to integrate the forces of his time into a coherent vision,¹⁵ a view of Whitman that came directly from Frank. The challenge to Crane of what Frank found in Whitman is seen in a passage from the 1855 "Preface" to Leaves of Grass, a passage which compares strikingly with parts of Crane's essay.

The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is today. If he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides . . . and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself and hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his Semitic muscle into its merits and demerits . . . and if he is not himself the age transfigured—let him merge in the general run and wait its development.

Despite Crane's natural antipathy for becoming a public voice to express the age, he was moved by Frank's vision. It should be noted in passing that fellow romantics such as Wordsworth, Emerson, and Shelley had written prose much like Crane's "Modern Poetry." The very simplicity of the machine as a symbol of progress, as Henry Adams noted, accounted for its astonishing power, the same argument John Stuart Mill had made in his commentary on de Tocqueville. Further, the attempt Crane made was quite in accord with the times, this strange marriage of experience and subjectivity so characteristic of modernism. His hope of combining personalism with a form of experience to create a single mythology of American history had been justified by Nietzsche long before when he had indicated that even philosophies of history would be personalistic: behind every observation is an eye. Malinowski had asserted that the religious life depends upon man's sense of the difference between the sacred and the secular ("these Godless days!" Crane had lamented). Since this simple distinction had broken down, perhaps one could discover that the secular was itself sacred. One is reminded of F. N. Cornford's rich suggestion that when a culture loses confidence in God, the sense of the sacred is transferred first to philosophy and then to science.

Crane in search of a form for his vision was attracted easily enough to the promise of science and technology.¹⁶"We are not sure where this will lead, but after the complete renunciation symbolized in The Waste Land and, though less, in Ulysses we have sensed some new vitality" (To Waldo Frank, February 27, 1923). Culturally the promise of technology was filled with an immediate and apparent hope. That there would be necessarily a tremendous gap between what one expected of technology and what one would get made little difference. The expectations for technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before the present current of disillusion set in, were profound. The ultimate hope was that in the long run everybody would be relieved of problems and shortages that throughout history had made human life seem a trial. Only a generation ago, John Maynard Keynes held out this promise for all of us. If one could see spiritual forces at work in technology and connect this insight with the past and future of America, then one had seemingly a metaphysical base for hope and something to celebrate. "I want to keep saying YES to everything" (To Charlotte Rychtarik, September 23, 1923).

A brief account of the composition of The Bridge will document the extent of Crane's conversion, and will also reveal the troubled effort he made to force this view on his reluctant genius. On February 6, 1923 in separate letters to Gorham Munson and Allen Tate, Crane first mentioned The Bridge as yet too vague and nebulous in his mind to discuss in any detail. The initial conception, however, was meant to carry on the tendencies manifest in "Faustas and Helen" which he described later in "General Aims and Theories" as an attempt to discover an absolute conception of beauty the Greeks had in the midst of the "seething, confused cosmos of today." By February 18 he was prepared to go into more detail about the poem in a letter to Munson. The Bridge was now to be "a mystical synthesis" of America. Up to this point fewer than a dozen lines had beenwritten. Especially important in this letter is his reference to Munson's study of Frank. America's constructive future and unique identity would have to include our scientific achievements of the future. Although his ambition might be finally impossible, he noted that he was planning a symphonic form about as long as "Faustus and Helen": "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" (February 18, 1923).

I think we can infer that the Frank influence had made itself felt; Crane even began to see "Faustus and Helen" through these eyes. In a letter to Munson a few weeks later the "symbolic possibilities" of The Bridge were connected "directly with Whitman" through his reading of Frank (March 2, 1923). After meeting with Frank, he mentioned the "new consciousness" in his correspondence with Charlotte Rychtarik (April 13, 1923). By June 5 he was ready to begin again on the poem. In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz "the new consciousness" became the "higher tranquility"—the point arrived at when the terror of experience reaches a climax of intensity indicating that a new and higher stage of development will come. This was Frank's theory of the way civilization advances. Differing early versions of "Atlantis" were sent to Stieglitz and Charlotte Rychtarik on July 4 and July 21. Crane called it ecstatic poetry, "written verse by verse in the most tremendous emotional exaltations I have ever felt." By August the moment of visionary exaltation either was gone or had been exhausted; Crane confessed to Stieglitz that his mind was like dough and that The Bridge was "far away" (August 11, 1923). During this time he was in despair over the poem; only a tentative draft of "Atlantis" was finished (August 25, 1923). He wrote to Stieglitz in October voicing his hope that the poem soon would be finished so that it could be included in his first volume of poems.

The next mention of the poem in his letters was not until seven months later, March 5, 1924: "I would to God that I could get more done on my poem. .. . "He wrote to his mother on May 11, 1924 that it would be sometime before the poem could be completed. In another letter to his mother he indicated that he was still thinking of it as the final poem for his first volume: "But a long poem like that needs unbroken time and extensive concentration, and my present routine of life permits me only fragments" (September 23, 1924). The poem was not mentioned in his letters again until over a year later, December 3, 1925, when he requested a subsidy from Otto Kahn. It was by this time no longer thought of as a final poem for his first volume. The vague conception was still indebted to Frank-Whitman—"to enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America." (Notice the echo of Frank's Our America.) He was given $2,000. On January 18 he sent a revision of "Atlantis" to Waldo Frank. For almost three years that section had been The Bridge a section most congenial to his conception of himself as a poet of lyric vision. He mentioned to Frank that he was working at "Ave Maria." By March his mood had radically altered as he confessed to the Rychtariks and to Munson:

At times the project seems hopeless, horribly so; and then suddenly something happens inside one, and the theme and the substance of the conception seem brilliantly real, more so than ever! At least, at worst, the poem will be a huge failure! (To the Rychtariks, March 2, 1926)

As Waldo may have mentioned, the finale of The Bridge is written, the other five or six parts are in feverish embryo. They will require at least a year more for completion; however bad this work may be, it ought to be hugely and unforgivably, distinguishedly bad. In a way it's a test of materials as much as a test of one's imagination. (To Gorham Munson, March 5, 1926)

Since he felt that Otto Kahn expected a report from him, he sent him on March 18 an outline for the poem. At this time only the "Atlantis" section had been finished. Three of the projected sections would be completed eventually, a fourth changed radically, and a fifth dropped altogether. A few days later he sent the first verse of "Ave Maria" to Frank and told him as well how magnificent Virgin Spain was and how it was something of a prelude for his intentions in The Bridge.

In May Frank accompanied him to the Isle of Pines and stayed with him for about two weeks. Refreshed, it seems, by the change of scene. Crane started to write verse again, but made no progress on The Bridge. He then read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and sent Frank one of his most significant letters. It was a full-bodied critique of the underlying base of a poem not yet written, a prophetic criticism which anticipated the objections of his most perceptive contemporaries to the completed poem when it finally appeared. The letter must be quoted in detail.

Emotionally I should like to write The Bridge; intellectually judged the whole theme and project seems more and more absurd. A fear of personal impotence in this matter wouldn't affect me half so much as the convictions that arise from other sources. .. . I had what I thought were authentic materials that would have been a pleasurable-agony of wrestling, eventuating or not in perfection—at least being worthy of the most supreme efforts 1 could muster.

These "materials" were valid to me to the extent that I presumed them to be (articulate or not) at least organic and active factors in the experience and perceptions of our common race, time and belief. The very idea of a bridge, of course, is a form peculiarly dependent on such spiritual convictions. It is an act of faith besides being a communication. The symbols of reality necessary to articulate the span—may not exist where we expected them, however. By which I mean that however great their subjective significance to me is concerned—these forms, materials, dynamics are simply non-existence in the world. I may amuse and delight and flatter myself as much as I please—but I an only evading a recognition and playing Don Quixote in an immorally conscious way.

The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future destiny worthy of it. The "destiny" is long since completed, perhaps the little last section of my poem ["Atlantis"] is a hangover echo of it—but it hangs suspended somewhere in ether like an Absalom by his hair. The bridge as a symbol today has no significance beyond an economical approach to shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviourism, and toothpicks. . . . If only America were half as worthy today to be spoken of as Whitman spoke of it 50 years ago there might be something for me to say—not that Whitman received or required any tangible proof of his intimations, but that time has shown how increasingly lonely and ineffectual his confidence stands. (June 20, 1926)

By July 24, however, he was almost frenetically at work on different parts of the poem, beginning one of the most productive periods of his entire career. Yet by the end of August the ecstatic, feverish mood was gone and progress on the poem came to a standstill. During this brief period he completed "To Brooklyn Bridge," "Ave Maria," "Cutty Sark," "Three Songs," "The Tunnel," "The Dance," and a revision of "Atlantis." In his August 19 letter to Frank, Crane suggested that his reading of Spengler's "stupendous" book acted as a negative catalyst because it forced him to find a positive centre of action. He assured Frank that he had recaptured their vision. I think Crane was right in seeing Spengler as a catalyst, but I do not think he was a negative catalyst. If we look with care at the sections completed, with the exception of "Atlantis," we will notice that they reflect with great accuracy the mood of his June 20 letter expressing his immediate reaction to Spengler's work. The form of these poems does rise out of a past that overwhelms the present with its worth. No real links are forged between that past and any future destiny worthy of it. The overwhelming impression of the poems is that the worth of the past serves as a means of embarrassing the hopeless present. That present is represented by the bedlamite of "To Brooklyn Bridge," the horrors of "The Tunnel" without its falsely intruded stanza, and the drunken sailor of "Citty Sark." Whitman's confidence does indeed seem "lonely and ineffectual." The paradox appears to be that Spengler somewhat directly inspired, willy-nilly, some of the most elegantly fashioned sections of The Bridge.

During November and December of 1926 he wrote to various friends that he hoped to finish the poem shortly. He was confident and waiting for it to spill over. "I am not worried." And then this very enlightening observation to his mother: "Am making as much effort as possible to free my imagination and work the little time that is now left me on my Bridge poem. So much is expected of me via that poem—that if I fail on it I shall become a laughing stock and my career closed" (December 22, 1926). This seems to indicate that the poem conceived as a whole had become a burden to him. He recognized the existence of external pressures forcing him to complete a poem for which he was having difficulty finding a centre. That he saw the already completed poems as discrete and not dependent upon some whole can be deduced from the way he submitted them for publication. In no instance did he hedge the submission with any indication that this was work-in-progress. On January 24, 1927 he submitted "Cutty Sark" and "Harbor Dawn" along with "O Carib Isle" to Edgell Rickword for publication in The Calendar, noting the marine emphasis in the three of them as justifying this multiple submission. He submitted "Van Winkle" and "Harbor Dawn" to New Republic, but they were rejected. On March 19 he wrote to his mother that "Ave Maria" would soon be coming out in The American Caravan and The Dial had accepted "The Dance." On March 27 he cheerfully reported to Tate that Harriet Monroe had accepted "Cutty Sark" for Poetry.

Although he wrote to both his mother and father in May telling them of the urgency he felt to get the poem finished, he confessed that nothing much was getting done. On July 4, however, he did send a copy of the newly completed "The River" to Mrs. Simpson. In his lengthy progress report to Otto Kahn (September 12, 1927) he discussed "To Brooklyn Bridge," "Ave Maria," "Harbor Dawn," "Van Winkle," "The River," "The Dance," "Indiana," as yet incomplete, "Cutty Sark," and the not-yet started "Cape Hatteras." He petitioned for more money in order to have the leisure to complete this "symphony with an epic theme." In his present state of mind progress on the poem was impossible. Almost a year later (March 28, 1929) in a letter to Isidor Schneider, Crane contended that he might have the nerve to continue on The Bridge if he could get certain things sorted out in his mind. He seemed troubled by the "new encyclopedias of the future" which every intellectual seemed obliged to publish. In June he wrote to Frank that he hoped to complete the poem in the coming summer. I do not think that a complete poem, as he and Frank were seeing the poem, would ever have been finished if Harry and Caresse Crosby had not offered early in 1929 to publish it. His May 1, 1929 letter to Schneider pretty well summarized the difficulties he had in the composing of the poem since that spurt of energy in 1926. Although he had not completed any additional sections of the poem, he announced the fall Paris publication. With Whitman's Leaves of Grass in mind, he planned such additions, if they eventuated, for some later edition.

I've alternated between embarrassment and indifference for so long that when the Crosbys urged me to let them have it, declaring that it reads well enough as it already is, I gave in. Malcolm [Cowley] advised as much before I left America, so I feel there may be some justification. The poems, arranged as you may remember, do have I think, a certain progression. And maybe the gaps are more evident to me than to others . . . indeed, they must be.

His description of the work as a series of poems with a "certain progression" is telling, I think.

After the Crosbys' offer, however, he was forced to face the fact that the whole was unsatisfactory. There was something missing. So Crane turned rather desperately, the evidence seems to indicate, to the composition of "Cape Hatteras."¹⁷ He regarded this section as crucial—"According to my ideas of The Bridge this edition wouldn't be complete or even representative without it" (To Caresse Crosby, September 6, 1929). "Cape Hatteras" was his last attempt to find a center and thus a subject for his poem. That is why Whitman became so important for this section, "a kind of ode to Whitman." Some final definition of his elusive visionary idea was absolutely necessary, as he confessed to CaresseCrosby. If we can entertain the theory that the newest part of a growing poem (for example, The Bridge, "Ash Wednesday") reveals most clearly its principle of unity because it is the part most immediate to the resolving motive of synthesis, then a reading of "Cape Hatteras" is especially instructive. As George Williamson put it, "the parts that are not published until the new composition appears commonly afford the best insight into the character of such poems."¹⁸ There is substantial agreement among many readers that this section is the singular failure in the poem. Its inflated bombast is an unconscious confession that his attempt for The Bridge as a whole to capture the positive aspects of the modern technological world had failed. "Cape Halteras" was Crane's final opportunity to put into The Bridge the ideas of Walt Whitman. It was the place for a specification of what, precisely, Whitman's univocal view of death and life meant and how it solved the problem which Spengler presented to Crane in his analysis of death and destruction. "This man [Spengler] is certainly fallible in plenty of ways but much of his evidence is convincing—and is there any good evidence forthcoming from the world in general that the artist isn't completely out of a job?" (To Waldo Frank, June 20, 1926). Frank's position had been that Whitman, specifically, was the best possible evidence that the artist in the modern world was not only not out of a job but desperately needed. In an earlier plan for The Bridge Crane wanted to present in a central section of the poem those principles of Whitman, "The Spiritual Body of America," which when spoken would illuminate the meaningful unity of death and life. He wanted to avoid basing his view on the historical "character" of Whitman.¹⁹In "Cape Hatteras," however, whatever Whitman stands for remains vague and unarticulated. Instead the historical character is thrust on the scene in a way that Allen Tate rightly characterized as sentimental.

The poem, considered as a single work, was at least completed, though it would be somewhat revised for the Liveright edition. The mixture of a powerfully self-centered lyric imagination with what Crane hoped would be an epic of national consciousness organized around a controlling idea would have to stand. The publication of the poem made the curious mixture permanent. As a result the brilliant success of so many sections of the poem would always be in a peculiar way altered by being considered as parts of an unstable whole. The already completed sections would gain nothing by being linked with "Cape Hatteras" and "Quaker Hill." At least the struggle, if not resolved, was ended. Crane's fears concerning the poem's unity and development were wellfounded. This is not to speak of the failure of most of the poems, published separately, which make up The Bridge. These poems, with the exception of "Indiana," "Quaker Hill," and "Cape Hatteras" are among the most brilliant in the history of modern literature. We sometimes forget that Crane's established and eminent reputation among his most perceptive contemporaries was based on the poems in White Buildings and the individually published poems which were eventually brought together in The Bridge. What "Cape Hatteras" (and "Quaker Hill") finally revealed was the failure of the design and intention of the new poem which tried to use previously published materials—poems which had their own autonomy built into their very structure.

Crane persisted over a period of six years attempting to make The Bridge into something it could not become. His frequent announcements concerning the scope of the poem made the whole effort a public affair, and he was bothered by this since he felt his inability to complete it would mark him as a failure. All of his friends as well as the literary establishment had been made fully aware of his ambitions. Not strangely for Crane, he also felt an obligation to Otto Kahn for his financial assistance. More important, however, was the compelling indebtedness he felt to Frank, an indebtedness that was the result of an extraordinary closeness. The effect of this was a reluctance to disappoint Frank. But it must be said again that what Frank offered him had a very powerful appeal to Crane. Always veering toward disaster, Crane was conscious of being inadequate in one way or another. Since Frank viewed him as an extraordinary poet with a cosmic vision, Crane was more than merely flattered. He was being offered by his father figure a towering vision of the function of the poet, a vision different from the ones Crane got from Tate or Yvor Winters. Instead of being cautioned to discipline his gift, he was encouraged by Frank to plunge boldly ahead, ridingthe whirlwind of his temperament, opening himself to the subjective visions which Frank misread as potentially cosmic. Whereas Crane saw himself finally as the poet of White Buildings, Frank encouraged him to see himself as a universal cosmic seer. Crane, always uneasy with any definition of his self, was eager to accept these new terms. A child reared in the shade, Crane thought he had a vision of the sun. His romantic impulse would conquer the world out here by imagining it into being on his terms—"the egotistical sublime." In this way Crane could catch the ineffable in the splendor of his apocalyptic vision. He could luxuriate in an order created by his own conceptions. He could will his ideas into existence and structure the world as a mirror of his own consciousness.

While Crane intended, insofar as his intentions were ever consistent, to make a poetic myth from the materials of history, it was really a metaphysical myth he sought—the kind of myth which no man can both create and believe in—"lend a myth to God."²⁰ Crane's sense of the "tragic quandary (or agon) of the modern world" was caused by his sense of the failure of any value system available to him. We live in a culture, he wrote to his mother, "without faith and conviction"; hence "at times it seems demonstrable that Spengler is quite right" (June 1, 1926). There are so few common terms that are solid enough to "ring with any vibration or spiritual conviction." The great mythologies of the past, even the Church, he lamented, are no longer able to sustain one.²¹ The times are so bewildering, he wrote to Frank, that there seems nothing to fight for. "In some ways," he repeated, "Spengler must have been right" (February 19, 1931). "The spiritual disintegration of our period becomes more painful to me every day" (To Gorham Munson, April 17, 1928). His conception of The Bridge was finally Promethean in that he had to start afresh with his own consciousness—the intractable ego—the pathetic reduction of the egotistical sublime. What T. S. Eliot said of D. H. Lawrence might well be applied to Crane: an extreme personality, a man of fitful insights rather than of ratiocinative powers.

The enthusiasm of 1923 had not been sustained, nor was the form of experience he tried to master and accept of any enduring value. The brief success of the summer of 1926, a result of reading Spengler, was never repeated, and Crane's confidence in his poem never fully returned. He was, at best, an uneasy Promethean. He was perhaps overly-conscious of the regular and terrible failures of his ego, a problem surely exacerbated by his unhappy experience in composing The Bridge. I do not mean to underestimate the urgent need he felt to create a new myth. His genuine and sensitive experience of the void moved him deeply and explains the compensatory attempt to satisfy this need. This was not a need, however, that could be satisfied by the symbolic uses of imaginative thought which is the very stuff of poetry. "Man is man because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them."²² The search that best explains the fragmentary character of The Bridge was for something else, for a metaphysical myth quickened by faith (and by faith alone) which can nourish the soul. Such myths, Jacques Maritain has explained, have no force except through the faith man has in them. Crane himself experienced this attempt and this failure throughout the history of the composition of The Bridge, as his letters show. The man kept pushing the poet to provide a belief in which the man could put his trust. The poet tried vainly again and again (the ever-shifting center of the poem) to satisfy the man. What Crane seemed to know intuitively (he certainly experienced it) was that the man must provide the poet with a vital belief. "Metaphysical myths are needed by poetry, but they cannot be provided by poetry."²³ If he had been satisfied with the new myth Frank had encouraged him to invent, he would have brought his poem to its conclusion without that agonizing doubt about its very conception which marks its history. Crane had agreed with Yvor Winters that there was a need for some kind of order, but he was not finally at ease with the design offered him by Waldo Frank. His search for unity without an adequate base in some certitude that went beyond his own invention of it had been a failure.

One of the most significant sentences Crane ever wrote, and it is at the base of my speculations, is one to Waldo Frank in a letter of June 20, 1926: "The Romantic attitude must at least have the background of an age of faith, whether approved or disapproved no matter." I think Crane was accurate when he described himself as "only a disappointed Romantic after all" (To Waldo Frank, February 19, 1931). Crane's romantic egoism was not cosmic enough to sustain the compositionof the kind of poem he forced The Bridge to be. Although he was compelled to peer into the void, he could not believe in the myth he had created to rescue him from it. The modern world (and it would have been any world that Crane lived in) was nothing more than a season in hell. He invented a fiction he hoped would release him from the prison of his own sensibility and unite him instead with the body (Pocahantas-Whitman) of America.²⁴ And although he struggled desperately to sing a myth out of this imagined fiction, he was at bottom convinced of the profound spiritual disorder of his time. He had hoped with The Bridge to answer what he thought was the "complete renunciation symbolized in The Waste Land," but his experience in composing the poem was instead a demonstration of T. S. Eliot's premise that the individual consciousness could not create its own world. At his best Crane depended upon the intensity of sensations to re-create single moments in the stream of sensation. His world had no center, and the effort he made to find one failed, creating the divided self fatal to his poetic sensibility. The bridging metaphor, where he was most at home poetically, was not the organizing center of a comprehensive philosophy. Because Crane was typical of the rootless spiritual life of modernism, his attempt to be the spokesman for the integrated culture of a future he forced himself to envision was doomed from the start.

NOTES

¹ Consider the implications, relevant only in small part to my thesis, of this insight of Katherine Anne Porter. This event took place in Mexico near the end of his life. "Later, drunk, he would weep and shout, shaking his fist, "'I am Baudelaire, I am Whitman, I am Christopher Marlowe, I am Christ' but never once did I hear him say he was Hart Crane." John Unterecker, Voyager, A Life of Hart Crane (New York, 1969), p. 659.

² "Hart Crane," Essays of Four Decades (New York, 1970), p. 310.

³ To Yvor Winters. May 29, 1927. The Letters of Hart Crane 1916-1932, ed. Brom Weber (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965). Since there are other editions of the letters, I will insert the date of the letter referred to and the name of the person to whom the letter is addressed parenthetically immediately after the citation when necessary for the convenience of the reader.

⁴ " . . . this "future' is, of course, the name of the entire disease" (To Gorham Munson, April 17, 1928).

⁵The Twenties (New York, 1962), p. 257.

⁶ Robert L. Perry's The Shared Vision of Waldo Frank and Hart Crane (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1966) suggests some topics which might be explored in more depth in future studies.

⁷ Despite his early reservations about Our America, and I have no reason to believe he reread it later, it seemed to have made a deep impression on Crane. Someone should study with care the many echoes of Our America in The Bridge. Almost all of the ideas in The Bridge first appeared there; even the correspondences in diction is striking.

⁸ On the other hand, Crane was well aware of the fact that Frank was almost alone in his enthusiasm for the epic design of The Bridge. Tate, Slater Brown, and Cowley (to mention only a few) had made their uneasiness with the Whitman business well known to Crane. In his April 11, 1926 letter to the Rychtariks, he is quite candid in observing that "people like Frnak will probably like it—that is, they'll be interested in the content and presentation, but most of my younger associates and friends will probably be pretty doubtful about it" (Unterecker, p. 442).

⁹ "Frank has the real mystic's vision. His apprehensions astonish me" (To Allen Tate, February 15, 1923).

¹⁰"Democratic Vistas is quite clearly our greatest book of social criticism as Leaves of Grass is our greatest poem." Our America (New York, 1919), p. 205.

¹¹ Before the influence of Frank took hold, Whitman had been one of the many poets Crane admired. The letters do not reveal that he was special as, say, Eliot and Blake were special to him. However, after he began to feel the impact of Frank he could write, "I begin to feel myself directly connected with Whitman" (To Gorham Munson, March 2, 1923).

¹² Frank argued that "we lack an instinctive metaphysical consciousness to make us master and absorb it—to fuse the machine with all its elements of will and act into our own expression" (The New Republic, November 18, 1925). Probably this essay and Munson's Waldo Frank influenced the ideas and diction of Crane's "Modern Poetry" written for Revolt in the Arts (1930), a collection edited by Oliver Sayler devoted to a consideration of the place of the machine in the modern arts.

¹³ Philip Horton has indicated that Ouspensky's Tertium Organum "became a common bible for the small group" led by Frank which included, besides Crane, Munson and Jean Toomer. During 1923 the four of them met frequently and discussed "the new slope of consciousness." When Munson and Toomer fell under the influence of the Russian spiritualist, Gurdjieff, with whom Ouspensky allied himself, the group lost its tight unity because Crane was unable to commit himself as a disciple. He was already Frank's disciple, and Frank had nothing to do with Gurdjieff. Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet (New York, 1937), pp. 154-156.

¹⁴ "He [Crane] had no politics, and he missed it. Spengler's Decline of the West greatly disturbed him because he needed to know it to be wrong. And I recall a letter Hart wrote urging me to answer it. . . . There was no room in the universe of the grim old Prussian for the hot, hopeful parabolas of Crane or other apocalyptic poets in verse and prose. He needed reassurance, and I seemed able to give it." (Emphasis added.) Waldo Frank, Memoirs of Waldo Frank, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), pp. 241-242.

¹⁵ "Modern Poetry," The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York, 1966), pp. 261-263.

¹⁶ In two early reviews, before he came under the influence of Frank and Munson, Crane blamed science and technology for the disintegration of culture and of men within that culture. See "The Ghetto and Other Poems by Lola Ridge," The Pagan, 3 (January, 1919), 55-56, and his review of Sherwood Anderson's Poor White in The Double Dealer, 2 (July, 1921), 42-45.

¹⁷ Actually "Quaker Hill" was the last part finished, but Crane admitted that it was not "one of the major sections of the poem; it is rather by way of an "accent mark' that it is valuable at all" (To Caresse Crosby, December 26, 1929). It does, however, raise precisely the same problem that "Cape Hatteras" does, and the two parts might well be considered together in making the point.

¹⁸A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot (New York, 1957), p. 190.

¹⁹ Brom Weber, Hart Crane (New York, 1948), p. 260.

²⁰ "The effort of a poet to create new metaphysical myths of his own invention, for the sake of his work as a poet, is self-contradictory, since, having invented them, he cannot believe in them. A man lost in the night might as well invent an imaginary moon because he needs to have his way lighted." Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York, 1953), pp. 180-181.

²¹ "General Aims and Theories," The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York, 1966), p. 218.

²² T.S. Eliot, "Second Thoughts about Humanism," Selected Essays (New York, 1950), p. 433.

²³ Maritain, p. 181.

²⁴ Allen Tate forecast this failure in his "Introduction" to White Buildings ina comment written when only a small part of The Bridge was in manuscript: "Whitman's range was possible in an America of prophecy; Crane's America is materially the same, but it approaches a balance of forces; it is a realization; and the poet, confronted with a complex present experience, gains in intensity what he loses in range. The great proportions of the myth have collapsed in its reality. Crane's poetry is a concentration of certain phases of the Whitman substance, the fragments of the myth."