SOURCE: "The Bridge," in On the Modernist Long Poem, University of Iowa Press, pp. 47-67.

[In the following essay, Dickie discusses the problems Crane encountered in dealing with the form of the long modernist poem.]

It is hazardous to begin writing a long poem at the end, and all the more so with a long poem that will rely on the poet's moments of inspiration. Hart Crane's difficulties in writing The Bridge may be traced to this peculiar method of composition and to the assumptions about form that it embodies. Crane finished the final section of The Bridge first, and he called it "Atlantis." With that section completed, it was hard to begin the poem, harder still because Crane saw the ending as "symphonic in including the convergence of all the strands separately detailed in antecedent sections of the poem—Columbus, conquests of water, land, etc., Pokahantus, subways, offices, etc., etc." (LHC 232). To begin at the end, where Poe thought all works of art should begin, placed almost insurmountable restrictions on the unwritten long poem; and Crane's completion of "Atlantis," a poem on which he had been working for three years, brought his writing on The Bridge to a temporary halt. "Atlantis" was the ending for a beginning that Crane could not imagine, and when he recommenced work on the long poem again some months later, he wrote a poem that essentially recasts "Atlantis"—"To Brooklyn Bridge." Then his writing stopped again. Eventually he resumed work on the poem, and, hedged in by a beginning balanced and doubled by the ending, Crane in one summer wrote most of the intervening sections.

In a different way from Eliot, Crane started his long poem too early, before he had prepared himself to write it. He imagined both that the long poem would come to him and that he could block it out first. He prepared an outline of the poem, and The Bridge emerged from a struggle between its inspired moments of composition and a preliminary plan. The plan proved to be an obstruction as well as an aid, encouraging creation but encouraging also the insights that made the plan unworkable. This long poem has always posed the problem of its organizational principle. If The Waste Land suffered from a dilatory composition and a structure realized only in the middle of the composition, The Bridge may suggest the problems presented by a plan developed fully prior to composition. The composition of The Bridge suggests that a predetermined structure can restrain the clarity of expression it is designed to serve.¹

Crane's peculiarly deterministic method of writing reveals an uncertainty about the long form and an anxiety about how to channel his creative impetuosity into a sustained work. These fears he attempted to allay by methods that were destined to intensify them. But this narrative of composition also indicates the importance of such antagonistic creative habits. The Bridge develops by evading its supposed purposes.

It is not surprising, then, that the poem has always appeared to be a structural puzzle. Crane's first critics judged the poem brilliant in parts but inadequate as a total work. Later readers found the poem as a whole sturdy, but identified some sections as weak. Still later, the failure or success of the larger structure was seen as of one piece with the failure or success of the individual sections. One critic has argued that "Crane's long poems do not develop, they recur," and the problems of organization that such a "poetics of failure" requires manifest themselves both in the part and in the whole.² Thus, questions of organization—always the first and most crucial points of debate for a long poem—have tended to force the very judgment from which they have arisen.

Actually, Crane himself was his first negative critic. Even before he had written anything but the ending of The Bridge, he began to suspect that he would not be able to construct the long poem, not because his own creative powers were inadequate, but because he could find no material on which to exercise them. It is a curious complaint for a poet committed to inspiration and to art as creation rather than imitation. Still, he commented, "intellectually judged the whole theme and project seems more and more absurd." And he goes on to say: "The symbols of reality necessary to articulate the span—may not exist where you expected them, however. By which I mean that however great their subjective significance to me is concerned—these forms, materials, dynamics are simply non-existent in the world" (LHC 261). And once he had finished the poem, he admitted to Allen Tate, "My vision of poetry is too personal to "answer the call' (LHC 353).

His sense of failure, early and late, stemmed from what he imagined was a failure of vision. Like Pound, Crane judged himself by his ability to see a unified meaning within the fragments of history. For him, the poem was to be a vision of synthesis or wholeness: "a mystical synthesis of "America,' "a symbol of consciousness, knowledge, spiritual unity," the "Myth of America" (LHC 124, 241, 305). And like Pound too, he underestimated the power of his creative strength to vindicate history by revising it. But his stated ambition toward a synthesis is much more conservative than the poem he actually wrote. His aspirations here call for a fixed form that was always at odds both with the proliferation of material on which it was imposed and with his own febrile creative energy.

Starting at the end became a persistent strategy by which Crane could satisfy his need for synthesis, and at the same time give free expression to a creative resistance to closure. The poem as a whole, its sections, and even its lines appear consistently to start at the end. For example, the final section, "Atlantis," opens with a vision of the whole bridge ("bound cable strands, the arching path") and a vision of wholeness ("Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream / As though a god were issue of the strings. . . . "). It ends at the beginning with that vision just about to be accomplished ("the orphic strings, / Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge") and with a questioning of vision ("Is it Cathay, / Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring / The serpent with the eagle in the leaves . . . ?"). Stanza after stanza opens with an image of wholeness and moves to more tentative images: "bound cable strands" and "voices flicker," "hails, farewells" and "splintered in the straits," "Swift peal of secular light" and "harvests in sweet torment," "thine Ever-presence" and "Whispers antiphonal." Even individual lines open and end in that way: "One arc synoptic of all tides below," "In single chrysalis the many twain," "O Answerer of all,—Anemone." The synopsis, singleness, answer, must be inevitably broken down into parts.

This poem and the larger poem which it launched develop neither by "symphonic convergence," nor by synthesis, nor by unifying strands. Both "Atlantis" and The Bridge set out an image of completion or wholeness, and then proceed to break itdown. This method operates at every level of the poem, from section to stanza to line to word combinations. Typically, the most complete form precedes its parts, and the parts, once they are enumerated, do not fit neatly together as a whole. Despite Crane's desire to affirm and unify, his poem tends to question and disassemble.

Crane's visionary inclinations, what R. W. B. Lewis has called his "apocalyptic hope,"³ are usually cited as reasons for the discrepancy between the poem he imagined and the one he actually was able to write. As his comments to Frank that are quoted above suggest, when Crane despaired he seemed to despair of constructing the bridge between the real world and his image of it, of finding materials to embody his vision. Yet, the actual narrative of composition as well as the poem that emerged from it do not support this view.

Almost from the beginning and certainly as soon as he had completed "Atlantis," Crane had a sense of the whole poem and the experiences that would form it. In an early letter to his benefactor, Otto Kahn, he laid out the sections that were to comprise The Bridge which, with the exception of the John Brown part and the two sections written last, he then proceeded to write. He had the evidence from history already sorted out, and he had also clearly established the symbolic significance of figures such as Columbus and Pocahontas. Nor were modern examples lacking from this early summary. He could already identify the subway section as "a kind of purgatory in relation to the open sky of last section" (LHC 241). There may be a certain visionary element in this outline, even a naive optimism about the creative process that lay ahead, but this scaffolding of the poem does not indicate a mind anxious for material to embody an idea. Nor was Crane misled about the symbolic significance of any element in the projected poem. Here, as in the finished poem, Pocahontas stands for "the natural body of America-fertility," and Columbus and Whitman are likewise accurately identified (LHC 241).

It might be argued that Crane's poem had been overdetermined, too clearly thought out before it was written through. But his difficulties in actually writing the poem would suggest otherwise. He composed in fits of inspiration that were in some minor way controlled by the plan, threatening to subvert its dominance and yet dependent on it too. For example, the climax of "Atlantis" is suspended at the end, but The Bridge does not develop by careful stages of increasing intensity up to this poem, which Crane described as a "sweeping dithyramb in which the Bridge becomes the symbol of consciousness spanning time and space" (LHC 241). Nor is there any gradual movement toward that ending. Sections do not build on one another; individual sections do not work toward affirmative conclusions. Yet the movement is not aleatory, because the composition appears to depend on this initiating structure which was there to encourage the poet when his inspiration flagged. Crane struggled through vision and revision to write a long poem that would fit between the ecstatic ending and beginning that, in their finish, offered no principle of development except the possibility that they could be repeated, dismantled, or recreated.

The ambition to project a long poem was fixed by the poet's fear of inadequacy, which inspired a too elaborate conception of the task ahead; this in turn created a failure of expression, so that Crane was always working at odds with himself. He explained his method to Kahn: "Naturally I am encountering many unexpected formal difficulties in satisfying my conception, especially as one's original idea has a way of enlarging steadily under the spur of daily concentration on minute details of execution" (LHC 241). The discrepancy is between the whole and the parts, between the colossal conception of wholeness, completion, and ending, and the proliferating parts needed to make up that idea. But, as the narrative of the poem's composition reveals, Crane made the middle sections of the poem not only difficult to write but impossible even as an experiment in composition. Every section had to be wedged between the unity of beginning and end. Each part would threaten the whole and keep open the hazards of long form, even as the poem lengthened out. No bridges, the sections of The Bridge deny their connective functions as they vie for autonomy within the poem's larger structure.

This process of development differentiates The Bridge from most poems which gaintheir length from some generative process. Because Crane starts his poem with a finished structure, the Brooklyn Bridge, "Answerer of all," "Atlantis," he has no way of generating a poem. Even when the poem undoes its end and moves toward origins, it either appropriates them or it denies their validity, destroying not only the idea of progress but the possibility of long form. For example, in the actual image of the bridge, Crane hears "labyrinthine mouths of history / Pouring reply," "Jason! hesting Shout!," "Beams yelling Aeolus," all voices from antiquity still present in the bridge, which is then identified as "O Choir, translating time." Thus, mythic origins are incorporated into the technological end, not superseded by it. At other points in "Atlantis," Crane seems anxious to envision the end as obviating or excusing the beginning, as he says:

Migrations that must needs void memory,
Inventions that cobblestone the heart,—
Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love.
Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower.

To conceive of the bridge in these two ways is to make links with the past either unnecessary or impossible, and in either case it prevents any poetic development based on generation. In order to write a long poem at all from this beginning, Crane had to keep repeating the ending, enlarging it with details, as he said, in a process which might be called degenerative form. He did not work toward wholeness and completion, but rather away from them, toward endlessly proliferating parts.

Crane's problems with form, which appear to derive from a too rigidly and extravagantly conceived whole, have their origin in his early uncertainty about representation. The drafts of "Atlantis" suggest that Crane wanted to represent the bridge as evidence of wholeness in the broken modern world, but he had not decided whether meaning inhered in the structure, was measured by it, played through it, or whether the bridge simply pointed to some vision beyond itself.⁴ In worksheets of the spring and summer of 1926, Crane tries out these possibilities by changing prepositions:

[with] [its]
And through the cordage, notching its white call
[after]
Arch into arch, from seamless tides below,
[With]
Their labyrinthine mouths of history.⁵

The "cordage notching with its call" implies some progression just as "arch after arch" does, but this possibility is written out in the final choice, "One arc synoptic of all tides below." Again, in this same draft, the important fourth stanza deals directly with the question of vision, and it locates the source of vision not in the bridge, as in the final version, but in dreams:

and soar [thread] [delve]
[cipher curves]
With curves of sleep into what lakes what skies
contain
The mythic laugh of spears.⁶

Questions of whether to use up or of or with plauged Crane throughout the drafts. In some sense, the final version refused to settle definitely on one location. The vision was "through the bound cable strands," "Up the index of night," "Onward and up," but also "In myriad syllables," "In single chrysalis," and finally, "To wrapt inception" "through blinding cables." Vision seems to run through the bridge, upward from it, toward an "Everpresence, beyond time" (italics mine). Thus, the significance of the bridge is never clear; meaning inheres in it and beyond it. By seeing the bridge both as a manmade creation of wholeness and the sign by which such wholeness "beyond time" could be apprehended, Crane created a structure false to the actual fact from which this symbol was abstracted and false also to the radical energy that inspired Crane's long poem. Crane made his bridge an icon—harp, altar, pledge, myth—but no bridge. And by calling the bridge "Answerer of all," he gave his poem a resolute closureand a preordained order that his creative proclivities could never sustain.

His was not an imagination either satisfied with or longing for answers or the forms that answers would contain. In "The Broken Tower," one of the last poems he wrote, he finally acknowledged that his song was a "longscattered score / Of broken intervals," the song made when "the bells break down their tower; / And swing I know not where." It is the radical energies which these bells represent, energies that will not be contained in towers or rigid forms, that inspired Crane's poetry from beginning to end. But in undertaking to write The Bridge, Crane attempted to channel these disruptive energies into an essentially conservative form and end.

The impulse to write the great myth of America came from Crane's reading of The Waste Land, among other sources. After Eliot's "perfection of death—nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind," Crane wrote (LHC 115). And a few months later, he elaborated this notion in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz, whose work he admired: "The city is a place of "brokenness,' of drama; but when a certain development in this intensity is reached a new stage is created, or must be, arbitrarily, or there is a foreshortening, a loss and a premature disintegration of experience" (LHC 138).

Crane's initial aim was to locate what he calls here variously "spiritual events," "resurrection," a "new stage," in some relation to the new forms of the modern city. His ambition would always be toward the whole, a conversion of parts into wholes. Thus, the Brooklyn Bridge becomes "steeled Cognizance," "intrinsic Myth," "Deity's glittering Pledge," "whitest Flower." This willed equivalence is another manifestation of beginning at the end. But such a method is not without its hazards. In equating nature, technology, and the supernatural, Crane mended the "brokenness" of the modern city by denying the city's modernity and history. Renaming the bridge, Crane not only denied its bridgeship but left himself no space in which to write his poem.

Crane seemed to be aware of the disparity between a vision that is apprehended as complete in itself and a poem that remained to be written. In "Atlantis," in the very heart of his ecstasy, he says,

O Choir, translating time
Into what multitudinous Verb the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In myriad syllables,—Psalm of Cathay!

The exact mood is hard to grasp here largely because the verb moves in at least two directions. The "Choir" seems to be in apposition to the Bridge, which is addressed in the line before, and thus we may read these lines as affirming the bridge's connective quality and fusing powers: time and verb", sun and water or sky and earth. But the phrasing unsettles that confidence: "Into what multitudinous Verb" might be followed by a question mark. Here it is in the form of an exclamation, but an exclamation with a question: the poet cannot imagine, can only marvel at whatever will be produced by this fusion. The lines then go on into the imperative: "recast/In myriad syllables." The translation and fusion appear to be reversed here, and one "multitudinous Verb" is itself to be translated into "myriad syllables." In turn, these syllables are to be translated into the "Psalm of Cathay." So the single and the many, the whole and the part, fuse and refuse to adhere in these lines.

Crane was committed to the "Vision-of-the-Voyage," the "Verb," the "Psalm," to the whole; and these lines, in their refusal to parse, testify to his desire for that wholeness in every word, every line, every stanza, and yet such a desire had a destabilizing effect on connections of words or lines into a total structure. The poem that remained for Crane to write had to be constructed word by word, and his real task was to negotiate between whole and part, something that was impossible if every part were conceived as a whole. As the poet leaves "the haven" of the bridge in "Atlantis," he cannot relinquish this vision of wholeness. He does not go far before he sees "still the circular, indubitable frieze / Of heaven's meditation." Although "Eyes stammer through the pangs ofdust and steel," they see still the "indubitable frieze." They cannot see parts; they can see only the whole, "one song devoutly binds." Such evidence cannot compose a poem, or rather it does not lead to any indication of the poem's constituent parts. Significantly here the poet imagines that he "backward fled" to "time's end." The direction of the flight is accurate; he must go back to the beginning in order to trace the process by which "time" was translated into a "Verb." But his destination, "at time's end," is peculiar if prophetic of Crane's paradoxical backward flight to the end from this magnificent early conclusion.

The experience of the backward flight in these lines of "Atlantis" is simply an optical illusion. The poet imagines himself on a boat leaving the harbor, although he experiences it as the harbor itself moving: "harbor lanterns backward fled the keel." But the optical illusion embodies a persistent way of seeing. As he wrote various sections of the poem, Crane moved away from his ending, and his vision of the bridge as an icon faded in the process. He came to the end of time, his own time and that of his poem, by a creative withdrawal from his initiating impulse. Far from leading up to the ending, the poem was written away from it.

The route was not entirely direct, as the order of composition of the actual sections clearly indicates. Crane moved back and forth, writing in the summer of 1926 the first section and the final version of the last, then going back in time to "Cutty Sark," "Ave Maria," and "The Dance," then forward to the present in "The Tunnel," "Three Songs," and "Harbor Dawn," and then both back and forward again to start work on "The River." This order is all the more curious because Crane had already established whether each section would fit into the final structure, and it would have been possible to write each in the sequence in which it was to appear. In fact, Crane himself seemed struck by the wayward progress of his work, writing to Waldo Frank, "All sections moving forward now at once! I didn't realize that a bridge is begun from the two ends at once," and later, "I skip from one section to another now like a sky-gack [sic] or girderjack" (LHC 270, 272). He concluded his remarks to Frank: "The accumulation of impressions and concepts gathered the last several years and constantly repressed by immediate circumstances are having a chance to function, I believe. And nothing but this large form would hold them without the violence that mar [sic] so much of my previous, more casual work" (LHC 272).

Crane's statement is interesting for its curious insistence both on an organizing larger form and the free functioning of concepts. Large form, in Crane's view, would not do violence to impressions; only casual work, by which Crane seems to mean shorter work without the design of The Bridge, violates. He is simply describing here the freedom and expansiveness he felt in writing a long poem. But these comments also reveal a certain ambivalence toward form: it should contain an accumulation of impressions but not be casual; it should order but not violate. The parts of The Bridge would not have been written without a conception of the whole, and yet the whole was never fully composed of the parts.

With these conflicting views, Crane could of course justify writing the sections in any order they "popped out," as he described his creative process. He could write as he was inspired to write, and still compose parts of a preplanned poem; he could be both Whitman and Poe. But The Bridge was neither conceived nor written as an open-ended poem in the style of Leaves of Grass. From the very start, Crane knew where he was going and toward what end, and individual sections were written to be placed into a predetermined scheme. At the same time, Poe's carefully plotted poem could not serve Crane as a model, committed as he was to inspiration and to the simultaneous creation of all parts.

Crane's method of composition indicates another curious byproduct of his degenerative form. He seemed to work in double sets, as if one expression inspired its opposite and peculiarly related form. After writing the last and first sections, he wrote another double set—"Ave Maria," the beginning of American history, and "The Tunnel," the end or present day. He then moved further toward the center of the poem to a set of love poems—"The Dance," a hymn to the fertile Indian princess and an invocation to historical origins, and its opposite, "Three Songs," a trilogy on the sterility of modern love. The sectionsthus balance each other and forestall the poem's forward movement: the despair and weak faith of "The Tunnel" correspond to the faith and fear of "Ave Maria," and the lust of "The Three Songs" responds to the passion of "The Dance." The desire to state and restate and unstate, to project one vision and then imagine an alternate and contradictory vision, indicates some of Crane's hesitancy about a developing structure, a doubt at the heart of his celebratory faith, a self-fulfilling fear of failure.

The sustained period of work on The Bridge in 1926 produced the poem's second section, "Ave Maria," which offered a possibility for locating the origin of Crane's subject in Columbus' voyage of discovery. Here is where the history began. However, Crane does not start at the beginning, but surprisingly neither does he start at the end, although he imagines Columbus himself imagining that he has discovered not America but "Cathay," "Indian emperies," "The Chan's great continent." In short, Crane's Columbus identifies his discovery as the end he had set out to find. Crane locates Columbus not at the actual moment of discovery or at the moment of triumphant return to Spain, but rather in mid-ocean, terrified that the weather or a mutinous crew will not allow him to return with the "word."

Thus placing Columbus, Crane eases into the central section of his poem with a tentative confidence that Columbus, like the poet, has "seen now what no perjured breath / Of clown nor sage can riddle or gainsay." But within that confidence, there is also the unmasking fear about his powers to express it. More than that, Crane places Columbus in mid-ocean and thus in time, fitting appropriately between origin and end. Columbus is most anxious there, counting time, "biding the moon/Till dawn should clear that dim frontier," noting its passage, "Some Angelus environs the cordage tree," and marveling at "all that amplitude that time explores." In mid-ocean, Columbus also juggles space; he stands between the Old World, land of his birth, his own origins, from which his visions made him an exile, and the New World, his land by discovery but from which he is also exiled by his misapprehension of it as Cathay.

If Columbus' voyage is to mark the beginning of Crane's myth of America, his location in mid-ocean announces Crane's retreat from the end, although it clearly articulates his reticence about origins. The myth of America did not begin during Columbus' return voyage to the Old World, nor did it begin in his fears that he would not complete his round trip; it was rather an idea in Columbus' mind or even before him in the hopes of a generation of navigators. These moments are given scant notice in "Ave Maria." Nor does Crane ever develop the moment when Columbus returns to Spain to announce his finding, a moment that is another potential origin for the myth of America.

Refusing a vision of the beginning, Crane places Columbus in mid-ocean, on this middle ground where he can deny the whole and recant the dream that had impelled him to search for it. He admits that the God he worships both contains and withholds the truth of man's origins and his destiny: "incognizable Word / Of Eden and the enchained sepulchre."⁷ So God's purpose is and is not revealed, and at the end Columbus withdraws into that incognizance. He had opened with a petition for a safe return, but he ends with a plea for "still one shore beyond desire." And then he breaks off with fragments: "Beyond / And kingdoms," a repetition of the Te Deum, and an appeal to the "Hand of Fire."

Just as there is no real beginning for this great voyage of discovery and no origin of the myth of America in the poem, so right here with Columbus Crane begins to deny the end. He leaves Columbus dangling in mid-ocean yet yearning for still more because he himself cannot close the poem. Columbus' anxiety here about a safe return as well as his willingness to journey forever mark the first stages of the poet's retreat from the idea of completion that was so affirmatively set forth in "Atlantis" and "Proem." "Ave Maria" acknowledges more fully than any other section the time and space between beginning and end, but in so doing it becomes entranced with its own inbetweenness, longs to perpetuate that and not to be a connective link pointing to other destinies. Crane's Columbus does not want to round out the journey, complete the circle, affirm the whole; he longs only for more, a vision "beyond desire," "Beyond."

This section was composed with "The Tunnel," the section that leads into "Atlantis" in the finished work just as "Ave Maria" had led out of "Proem." The double set reveals Crane's refusal to develop his long poem and his engagement with obsessive repetitions of points. Despite obvious differences, the two sections share the journey motif and the concluding image, "O Thou Hand of Fire," "O Hand of Fire." The journey of the modern subway rider, like that of the great navigator, is not completed. Although he gets to the East River, the modern traveller does not seem to have arrived at any destination. For him the journey has been "cruelly to inoculate the brinking dawn / With antennae toward worlds that glow and sink," a kind of demonic version of Columbus' "one shore beyond desire." Yet, despite this despair, he, like Columbus, is "Impassioned with some song we fail to keep," "some Word that will not die." The ending of the poem contains these mutually exclusive emotions. The subway rider seems to give up, admitting,

Here at the waters' edge the hands drop memory;
Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting lie.
How far away the star has pooled the sea—
Or shall the hands be drawn away, to die?

He has come to the eastern shore, the beginning of history and the point from which America, the subject of The Bridge, was launched. In this movement backward, however, he reaches an "abyss," not a point from which to start but a centripetal force preventing any beginning—time's end, in fact. The hands that "drop memory" lose the power to write, to "account" for time and to count it. But with the question mark the poem negates such an ending, and from this lowest point it moves to the final lines: "Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest / O Hand of Fire / gatherest." The prayer in the end echoes Columbus' final prayer for "one shore beyond desire," for a continuation of voyaging, of writing, of gathering, and again Crane appears to be retreating from the vision of "Atlantis" even as this poem leads into it.

One indication of this retreat is the poem's obsession with beginning, despite its ending and its own position at the present day or end of American history as Crane saw it. The first scene projects a play opening: "Someday by heart you'll learn each famous sight / And watch the curtain lift in hell's despite." From here, the speaker is launched on a series of journeys, leaving with "a subscription praise / for what time slays." He cannot decide whether to ride or walk, feeling trapped either way in some kind of restricted form ("boxed alone a second, eyes take fright"). When he does move, he comes to a dead end, fleeing the call girl who calls out, "if / you don't like my gate why did you / swing on it." He moves along, meets Poe, whom he identifies with "Death, aloft," sees he is destined for "Gravesend Manor," but keeps on going toward morning imagined as "the muffled slaughter of a day in birth."

Thus, the beginning is made into the end; dawn is identified with a world of waste, evidence of time's degenerative process. The "burnt match skating in a urinal," "Newspapers wing, revolve and wing," the "tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam," "the oily tympanum of waters," all detail a world that is used up, run down, begrimed. Language, too, seems to be part of this general decay. The people who speak throughout this section repeat themselves, use only cliches or degraded language. Crane says:

Our tongues recant like beaten weather vanes.
This answer lives like verdigris, like hair
Beyond extinction, surcease of the bone;
And repetition freezes.

The answer at this point is not the "Answerer of all," but rather is identified with death and decay.

Recanting the affirmation of "Atlantis," Crane is forced here to acknowledge the corrosive power of time. Time does not fuse; it disintegrates. It provides no bridge from one point to another. The poem can offer now no pardon for history, no excuse even for its own composition. The poet is isolated, alone, and hislanguage fragments: "Tossed from the coil of ticking towers. . . . Tomorrow, / And to be. . . . / Here by the River that is East." Unable to locate himself in time, even cast out from time, he loses all direction. Still, "The Tunnel" does not end with these images of dispersal, dislocation, uncertainty, but rather with the poet's desire to gather up again, gather himself, his poem, to be returned to the coil of time, his hand in the hand of God. The great despair in this section is balanced by a desperate hope in the end, and once again the poet's genius at taking things apart reveals itself. He can undo even his own despair.

Composed in the same creative spurt as "The Tunnel" was "The Dance," the only part of the long central section, "Powhatan's Daughter," to be completed in these early stages of writing in the summer of 1926. It was a remarkable feat of creation to move from the fragmented utterance of "The Tunnel" to the formal organization of "The Dance." But this narrative of composition sets off "The Dance" from the other parts of "Powhatan's Daughter" and indicates that here too Crane started at the end he hoped he would achieve.

"The Harbor Dawn" and "The River," the first and third poems in "Powhatan's Daughter," were started, but they were not completed until the next summer, when Crane also worked on "Van Winkle"; and "Indiana," the final poem in that section, was one of the last to be composed. "Powhatan's Daughter" can be read, as it is published, as a journey back in time to the Indian and in space to the Mississippi, and then forward again to the pioneers and movement once more east. But it may also be read in the order of its composition as it charts the degenerative stages in Crane's inspiration.

"The Dance" belongs to the initiatory vision evident in "Atlantis" and "Proem," still there in "Ave Maria," and fainter still in "The Tunnel." Like Columbus, Pocahontas offered Crane a marvelous opportunity from history, a real person in whom to locate his understanding of the myth of America. Crane's use of Pocahontas suggests that in his earliest inspiration he worked from historical figures, trying to make his poem close to reality. But even here, the impulse was thwarted. Crane did not take advantage of the known facts about Pocahontas the historical personage.

The real story of "The Dance" is Crane's own search for "Mythical brows we saw retiring." Typically, these mythical brows of winter king and glacier woman are retiring or fleeing backward. They are "loth" but "destined" in their flight, the speaker acknowledges, as if his acquaintance with them were intimate or rather, since he uses the first person plural, as if they were figures well known to the community. These mythic figures seem also to beckon to those they have left as "Greeting they sped us, on the arrow's oath." So the poet is encouraged in his pursuit of them. But somehow, between the retirement and the present, "lie incorrigibly what years between." As always in Crane, the time scheme here is confusing, as the speaker seems to be witness both to the past and to the present. The Indian and his nature gods have gone, "destined" by the course of history to depart, so we may assume that their departure is "incorrigible." Yet they appear to the poet "loth" to go, and he sets out to reclaim them, to rewrite their ending.

He charts his search in carefully rhymed quatrains, as if such hypnotic regularity would itself restore the Indian gods. And in fact it does, as through it he approaches the Indian dance: "its rhythm drew, /—Siphoned the black pool from the heart's hot root." He is mesmerized by Maquokeeta's tranced performance, urging him on:

Dance, Maquokeeta! snake that lives before,
That casts his pelt, and lives beyond! Sprout,
horn!
Spark, tooth! Medicine-man, relent, restore—
Lie to us,—dance us back the tribal morn!

This is a pivotal stanza in "The Dance" and in the composition of The Bridge because it carries the burden of Crane's desperate desire to get back to the beginning which he now realizes he can never accomplish.

Up to this point in "The Dance," and in fact in The Bridge, the speaker has been outward-bound, on an open-ended search for something identified here as Pocahontas, for the magic that will restore not only her presence but a sense of history itself to a world which has been cut off from such knowledge. In this poem the search ends, or at least the speaker imagines its ending, as a backward dance to the tribal morn. But to get there, time itself, embodied now in the serpent figure Maquokeeta, must "relent." To get back to the beginning, the speaker must deny history, and to deny history is, the speaker blurts out, a lie. This dilemma is deepened by Crane's method of composition. Crane cannot trace to its origin the splendor of "Atlantis." It remained as resistant to discovery or analysis as Pocahontas. Thus, the narrative of the poem's composition traces the inadequacy of the poem's narrative.

Time, Crane discovers, will not relent. To identify with the Indian as the speaker does ("I, too, was liege / To rainbows currying each pulsant bone") is also to identify with his death. To separate himself from such a fate is to undercut the confidence of the end: "We danced, O Brave, we danced beyond their farms." The affirmative vision of "Atlantis" cannot hold up against time—either the history the poem relates or the history of the poem itself as the poet moves through various stages of composition.

The point at which the speaker says to Maquokeeta, "Lie to us," cannot be glossed adequately as an appeal to the sacred lie—something like Wallace Stevens' "supreme fiction"—as R. W. B. Lewis does. This is largely because Crane has been too earnestly negotiating with history and with what he calls "Cognizance," "some Word that will not die," and these references must reverberate through that phrase.⁸ To equate lies with the backward dance is to acknowledge the fact of history. The tribal morn cannot be restored except through a lie, and as the poem itself proves, a lie about the very history that it invokes.⁹

But the implications of this discovery were treacherous for the poet of a visionary synthesis. If past and present can be equated, time itself made to relent, and history rewritten so that the Indian still dances beyond his fate, then the poet's invocations to images of wholeness here and throughout The Bridge must rely on an equally false equivalence. Between the "steeled Cognizance" and the "incognizable Word," there would thus be no difference. The "Unfractioned idiom" would exist only in fractioned idiom. Cognizance would be equivalent to incognizance, and incognizance to cognizance. If we can deny what we know and claim what we cannot know, the very act of naming is called into jeopardy. By identifying with the Indian, Crane hoped to restore the beginning, but in doing so, he cancelled out the very notion of beginning and end.

Crane might have stopped his composition here. But it is a testament to the tenacity of his longing for long form that he moved on to write the next section, "Three Songs," poems about modern women, figures who are in their minimalization of the female principle the obverse of Pocahontas and yet doomed to suffer the same fate of cancellation. In "Southern Cross," the first of the three songs, the poet's search for the Indian princess and all she embodied has dwindled into a lustful yearning for some "nameless Woman." Identity becomes the issue here as he is willing to assign her any name: "Eve! Magdalene! / or Mary, you? / Whatever call—falls vainly on the wave." In "National Winter Garden," the lust remains undifferentiated: "You pick your blonde out neatly through the smoke. / Always you wait for someone else though, always—." And in "Virginia," although the girl is called Mary, she seems to be a multifaceted girl, at once just a date, "Saturday Mary, mine!" and then a Rapunzel figure, "Mary, leaning from the high wheat tower," and finally the virgin, "Cathedral Mary." Here in this section are all the faces of women: Eve, Magdalene, Mary. But, as with all faces and names, they are one—the object of the poet's intense but fruitless longing for the capacity to possess them through naming.

Names, both as links and as points of differentiation, had concerned Crane from the beginning of his work on The Bridge in the creative frenzy of the first summer.¹⁰ To name is to possess whole, Crane imagined then, but he was to discover the fragility of such aspirations. "Cutty Sark," located in thepublished work between two sections on pioneers that were almost the last parts written ("Indiana" and "Cape Hatteras"), takes its themes and concerns from the poems just discussed that were written during the same period. Something of the atmosphere of "National Winter Garden" is evident in the bar scene, "the / swinging summer entrances to cooler hells." And Pocahontas' spring is here in the "skilful savage sea-girls / that bloomed in the spring." But two larger issues that came to obsess Crane as he worked on the parts of The Bridge take over "Cutty Sark." The process of writing had led Crane from vision to verb, from large structures to small components, as he turned his concern first to names and then to time, or to time as it issues from names.

The frame of the poem is a song from the nickelodeon, "Stamboul Nights," heard in a modern bar by a drunken sailor who recalls there his own past and the American past of the clipper ships and their explorations of the Orient. Time blurs in this drunken reverie, chiefly by a free association of names. "Stamboul Nights" recalls "Stamboul Rose, " who becomes not just some pickup in a port but "Rose of Stamboul O coral Queen—/ teased remnants of the skeletons of cities. " This evocation of lost cities brings up Atlantis, a reminder for the poet at least of just how far he has moved from the fabled end that he had posited at the beginning of his poem. But Atlantis is introduced with the notion that in the mind of this drunken sailor the mere passage of time "may start some white machine that sings," send him into dawn, while his companion "started walking home across the Bridge." In this moment of composition, the poet writes himself back to his original structure, now irremediably altered in his imagination.

The last part of "Cutty Sark" is a series of catalogues—first a catalogue of reasons for trade with China ("Blithe Yankee vanities, turreted sprites, winged / British repartees"), then a catalogue of locations en route ("the Line," "the Horn / to Frisco, Melbourne"), then the names of ships themselves ("Thermopylae, Black Prince, Flying Cloud," "Rainbow, Leander," "Taeping," "Ariel"), names with their own histories, we might note. As a way of organizing, the catalogue is inclusive without being explanatory. It is also a form that equates everything; here reasons for trading, shipping routes, ships themselves, are all given the same treatment. Thus, the differentiation that names afford is minimized. And despite the range of historical references in the names of the ships, time itself as a divisive strategy seems to be cancelled. Just as the sailor is "not much good at time any more" since that "damned white Arctic killed my time," so the appearance here in the twentieth century of the clippership era seems to attest to the obliteration of time in the mind of the poet, who does not even attempt to connect this vision with the scene in the bar, but simply attaches it here to the end of the poem.

In explaining this poem to Otto Kahn, Crane acknowledged his persistent method by saying the poem "starts in the present and "progresses backwards.'

"Cutty Sark" is built on the plan of a fugue. Two "voices"—that of the world of Time, and that of the world of Eternity—are interwoven in the action. The Atlantis theme (that of Eternity) is the transmuted voice of the nickel-slot pianola, and this voice alternates with that of the derelict sailor and the description of the action. The airy regatta of phantom clipper ships seen from Brooklyn Bridge on the way home is quite effective, I think. It was a pleasure to use historical names for these lovely ghosts. Music still haunts their names long after the wind has left their sails. (LHC 307-8)

Most curious here is Crane's notion that names evoke history, or rather that the music of names outlasts their references. Names that can slip from one context to another may not serve as reliable links in any structure, and names that have a layered context may end up meaning so many things that they serve no particular connective function.

"Cutty Sark" has seldom been read as one of the strongest sections of The Bridge, yet it was written right after the very powerful "Ave Maria." Along with "The Dance," these poems are Crane's first efforts to deal with points in American history, to find some connection between the present and the past, to locate theorigin of the "Atlantis" vision in time and space. Yet they also undercut their connections, resist their purpose, and remain suspended in a drunken haze or frenzied trance.

As Crane moved in toward the center of his long poem in that first burst of creativity, starting "The Harbor Dawn" and "The River" before he put his work aside, he moved further and further away from the power that in "Atlantis" he called "arching strands of song." The "many twain" that he was moved to embody in "single chrysalis" in that final section pulled apart as he wrote. The poet seemed conscious in mid-poem of the need to bring various strands together, and he tries to compensate for the dispersal of his poem by imagining his task as an act of weaving: in "Cutty Sark" dreams "weave the rose," or "weave / those bright designs the trade winds drive," or in "The Harbor Dawn" the speaker urges the "blessed" one beside him to "weave us into day." Like Melville's weaver god, this figure is unseen but felt, her "signals dispersed in veils." However, her mysterious and fleeting presence mirrors the mystery of those activities—so central now to Crane—of weaving, uniting, completing.

As the last great section of The Bridge to be written, "The River" is the most desperate in its desire to weave the various strands of the poem together, the most farranging in the material it includes, but it is also the most revisionary. In the Mississippi River, Crane finds at last the image that will serve his purposes. It is not the bridge, not even a bridge. But as an energy and force, it is a more appropriate image for what Crane now sees he can do with the subject he has set himself. As he comes into the image very gradually and tentatively, almost as if he were afraid of it, he is possessed by a language that can serve him. But if his comments to Kahn are any indication, Crane seemed almost totally oblivious to the power of this most powerful section of The Bridge. He felt that he had simply approached the Indian world which, he claims, "emerges with a full orchestra in the succeeding dance" (LHC 307). In many ways, "The River" is a more elaborate and powerful version of "The Dance." Here there is no false equivalence, but a slow, gradual, and steady movement from one time to an earlier time.

The section opens with what Crane identified as jazz rhythm, always his favorite notion of how to embody speed, but this section is more significant for its obsession with names than for its rhythms. Here Crane opens with a list of trade names—labels: "Tintex—Japalac—Certain-teed Overalls ads." Yet, he concludes immediately, with all the labels we are still unable to find meaning, to read sermons in "RUNning brooks." Such names do not signify anything, especially now fifty years after the poem was written. Only the poem's hobos who are left behind by the train, which is called significantly the Twentieth-Century Limited, know names that are attached to meaning: "watermelon days," "Booneville" for early trouting. Their wisdom stems from experience, not from reading, and from a true knowledge of time. They can identify differences in time and space. For such travellers willing to abandon themselves to the continent, the midnights are "rumorous," and dreams "beyond the print that bound her name." All that has been taken in by the word will become "Dead echoes!" in comparison to the touch of "her body." As the gloss notes indicate, the land must be approached by getting away from names or renaming, "knowing her without name" "nor the myths of her fathers." Typically, Crane undercuts his poem's purpose in his acceptance of namelessness, mythlessness, and yet he continues to name and to search for myths.

To make this contact, the "Pullman breakfasters" are urged to "lean from the window," "gaze absently below," "turn again and sniff once more—look see." In this movement toward the river, the travellers also relinquish themselves to time: "For you, too, feed the River timelessly. / And few evade full measure of their fate"; "Down, down—born pioneers in time's despite." The movement continues its downward plunge into the earth, "Damp tonnage and alluvial march of days," "O quarrying passion, undertowed sunlight!"

The Mississippi River has become here the model of signification that the bridge, as Crane conceived of it, never could be. In Crane's terms, the bridge was a completed structure, a symbol of completion and wholeness, a sign of man'sability to conceive of such a view, but in its iconicity not very useful as a model for a long poem's structure. By contrast, the river spreads, flows, lengthens, throbs, "heaps itself free," fades, "lifts itself from its long bed," moves always by "its one will—flow!" In the strong final image, the river reveals its power as arising from its progress, its length and slowness, its accession to time:

—The Passion spreads in wide tongues, choked
and slow,
Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below.

These lines are puzzling. But they pay tribute to difference, to difficulty, to two forces meeting, and to silence. In short, they acknowledge meaning as something achieved through time and space. The "Passion" has tongues and presumably speaks; and, identified as it is here with the Mississippi River and with time as well as space, it suggests that only by acknowledging and not obliterating the course of time and our own implication in it can we sing. In this sense, these silent hosannas recall Columbus' Te Deum as a hymn of praise that is also in part a plea for continuation. Almost finished with his long poem, Crane at this point could acknowledge time and change, the time he had taken in getting to "The River" and time as an avenue to meaning. This section marks Crane's slow progression toward meaning not given at the beginning but achieved in the writing, an idea he dismissed at the beginning of his writing and resisted until it alone would provide him with some consolation.

The long poem has become the product of various stages of composition—the opening poet declaring the sufficiency of beginning and the concluding poet acknowledging the triumph of the end. But because Crane wrote the poem in a different sequence from the one which we read, the beginning sufficiency comes to the readers at the end, when it has been seriously undercut by the actual final composition. Once Crane found the image that would serve him as a structural model, the river gathering strength as it goes, he did not go on to write better than he ever had before. It must be admitted that "The River" marked the end of Crane's great productivity. He neither went back to revise sections written earlier nor was he able to project better sections still ahead. He finished "The River" in 1927 along with "Van Winkle." "Van Winkle" is not a major contribution to the long poem, although it is a fuller acknowledgment of time than Crane had achieved before.

The three remaining sections of The Bridge were not written until 1929, under the compulsion to finish inspired by an offer from Harry and Caresse Crosby, editors of the Black Sun Press, to publish the entire poem. These sections, "Cape Hatteras," "Quaker Hill," and "Indiana," are generally judged the weakest in the long poem, evidence that the progress of the poem exacted a toll on the poet's creative energies. The various ways in which these poems are overwritten suggest the extent to which Crane was straining at the end, trying desperately to pull the whole poem together or at least to fill in the gaps. But each of these poems reveals some knowledge of what had gone wrong. Behind the bombast and repetition of "Cape Hatteras," means by which Crane hoped to cover the emptiness of its subject, the poet is remarkably candid. He says, to his predecessor, for example, "Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity / Be still the same as when you walked the beach." It is a despairing plea, a desire to escape his task on the grounds of the monstrosity of historical development, but it is also a concession to time and the fantastic differences it could produce. At the end of "Cape Hatteras," Crane insists on both the "Open Road" and the "rainbow's arch," the extended, extending journey and the finished form, ambitions reminiscent of Columbus' mutually exclusive desires to return home and to keep on voyaging.

In contrast to "Cape Hatteras" and its inflated language, "Indiana" is rigidly controlled in binding rhyme schemes, artificial sentence structures, and sentimentalized scenes. The plea is the mother's regressive wish to bind her son to her through need and guilt and pity. Still, despite the wordiness of this poem, the mother here, like the poet, has learned a healthy disrespect for words, taken in as she has been by a "dream called Eldorado." Coming back from the barren pioneering venture with her newly born son, she meets an Indian squaw withher baby, and she offers her own baby as an emblem of their common condition and "Knew that mere words could not have brought us nearer." Disappointed, still she has gained a wisdom that stems from love itself and not from words. Just as she holds up her baby for the Indian to see, so she trusts her son to write to her: "you'll keep your pledge; / I know your word!"

If "Cape Hatteras" is bombastic and "Indiana" sentimental, then "Quaker Hill" veers between self-pity and excessive cynicism. It may be, as the quotation from Isadora Duncan states, that "no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth, " but the disappointment is expressed in terms that are too cynical, as Crane concludes, "This was the Promised Land, and still it is / To the persuasive suburban land agent." The view here is only of death: "High from the central cupola, they say / One's glance could cross the borders of three states; / But I have seen death's stare in slow survey." He suffers the ending, "In one last angelus lift throbbing throat—/ Listen, transmuting silence with that stilly note // Of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!"

For the poet who had started out with the assurance that "one song devoutly binds—/ The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings," this is a terrible end. The choir translating time has lost its power. The song which had been identified at the beginning of Crane's enterprise with the bridge, with arching strands, "One arc synoptic," with connections and completion, has been reduced to a "stilly note." Crane's last angelus is a pained and minimal effort, one note rather than a song that binds. Surprisingly, though, this note is echoed by "That triplenoted clause" of the "whip-poor-will," and so desperate is Crane's need that the bird's song, even in its dying fall, "unhusks the heart of fright."

From "Atlantis" to "Quaker Hill," the progress of the actual composition of The Bridge has charted a gradual diminishment of vision, a dispersal of energy, a dismantling of the whole structure. The vision in "Quaker Hill" belongs only to the cows: "Perspective never withers from their eyes" (italics mine), Crane says, as a corrective to his former hopes. The old hotel still stands on top of Quaker Hill, its broken windows "like eyes that still uphold some dream." In this landscape, "resigned factions of the dead preside." The elements that came together in "Atlantis" are all separate here. The past and the present are irreparably divided as time has turned the "old Meeting House" into the "New Avalon Hotel," "highsteppers" replace the "Friends," "Powitzky" takes over from "Adams." The poet finally admits that the "slain Iroquois" and "scalped Yankees" are not one identity but two, and he must "Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage" "With birthright by blackmail." He is left now with "the arrant page / That unfolds a new destiny to fill." The "arrant page" of the poem has wandered away from the "clear direction" promised in "Atlantis." The "orphic strings" do not "leap and converge" at this end as they promised to do at the beginning. And the poet has no time to "fulfill" his "new destiny," finished as he is with the structure he had set out years before that had completely drained his creative energies.

The Bridge as Crane wrote it and The Bridge as we read it are quite different structures. The first closes on a "stilly note / Of pain," the second on "One Song, one Bridge of Fire!" Crane stood by his original structure as the years went by, and as he produced within it a series of sections that threatened its stability. As published, The Bridge can hardly be read as a sequence, if we mean by that term a series with continuity and connection. It moves erratically through history from Columbus to the present and then back into the far past of the Indian and up again to the near past of the pioneer and the clipper ships, and forward into World War I and the subway. And even within these sections, the movement is back and forth, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe appearing in the modern world as the poet merges into the old world.

But, as planned and published, The Bridge seems to be designed to affirm unity and wholeness while accommodating certain historical points, or rather an interpretation of American history as itself unified and whole. In the plan, the affirmation and the proof were one. This overall structure had necessarily to be abandoned as soon as Crane began to focus on all the sections between beginningand end. If they were to be written, they had to be differentiated, separated from the wholeness and unity, and made particular. Thus differentiated, they were either not part of the whole, since no principle of unity was acknowledged, or they were only part of an overdetermined unity where one word, one time, one event, was the same as any other. The vision of "Atlantis" and "Proem" did not acknowledge time, either the time of American history or the time of the poem's composition." It was the middle sections of The Bridge, as they negotiated with historical moments and their own creative history, that had to wedge open a space for themselves in the larger structure. In the process they threatened the unity, the equivalence of beginning and end, but they made the long poem possible. Without the original plan, the individual sections might never have been written or, if written, might have simply proliferated to no end, so that Crane's original determination did, provide some stability. However, had the original idea not been held in abeyance, shifted around, bypassed, or dismantled at points, the long poem would not have been written. As this narrative of composition suggests, The Bridge degenerated in vision and in verbal power, but it also grew through the means of such degenerative form.

NOTES

¹ See the letter to Otto Kahn, March 18, 1926, which outlines the poem and explains the "interlocking elements and symbols at work" in the poem, in LHC, 240-42. The critical debate over The Bridge goes back to its early reviewers—Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, among others—who had praised Crane's first volume of poetry, White Buildings, but found The Bridge a failure. See Tate's "Hart Crane," in Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), 26-42, and Winters, "The Progress of Hart Crane," Poetry 36 (June 1930): 153-65. The discussion continues in John Unterecker's "The Architecture of The Bridge," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 3 (Spring-Summer 1962): 5-20; Donald Pease's "Blake, Crane, Whitman, and Modernism: A Poetics of Pure Possibility," PMLA 96 (January 1981): 64-85; Suzanne Clark Doeren, "Theory of Culture, Brooklyn Bridge, and Hart Crane's Rhetoric of Memory," MMLA Bulletin 15 (Spring 1982): 18-28.

² Joseph Riddel, "Hart Crane's Poetics of Failure," ELH 33 (December 1966): 482.

³ R. W. B. Lewis, "Days of Wrath and Laughter," in Trials of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 202.

⁴ See the drafts of "Atlantis" in Brom Weber, Hart Crane (New York: The Bodley Press, 1948), Appendix C, 425-40.

⁵ Weber, 432-33.

⁶ Weber, 437.

⁷ R. W. B. Lewis makes this point in The Poetry of Hart Crane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 265.

⁸ Lewis, 311-12.

⁹ See Eric J. Sundquist, "Bringing Home the Word: Magic, Lies, and Silence in Hart Crane," ELH 44 (Summer 1977): 376-99, for a psychoanalytic reading of this passage and the whole poem. Sundquist reads the poem as the story of "the sacrifice of ancestral fathers with one eye toward sexual reunion with a maternal, free origin, the other toward the debt aroused by the parricide necessary to an acquisition of power over that origin" (376).

¹⁰ Crane's fascination with names and puns is discussed by John Irwin, "Naming Names: Hart Crane's "Logic of Metaphor,' The Southern Review 11 (April 1975): 284-99, and by Roger Ramsey, "A Poetics for The Bridge" Twentieth Century Literature 26 (Fall 1980): 278-93.

¹¹ John Carlos Rowe develops the Nietzschean bias in Crane's treatment of history in "The 'Super-Historical' Sense of Hart Crane's The Bridge," Genre 11 (Winterl978): 597-625.