SOURCE: "The Writing of 'The Bridge': 1923-1929," in The Broken Arc: A Study of Hart Crane, Oliver & Boyd, 1969, pp. 121-51.

[In the following essay, Butterfield attempts to account for the disunity within The Bridge by examining the circumstances surrounding its composition.]

I am perfectly sure that [The Bridge] will be
finished within a year.¹ (Crane—Jul. 21, 1923)

The usual criticism of The Bridge is that, while many of the separate parts are of an astonishing power and beauty, the whole lacks order, unity, and coherence. In the last few years there have been several attempts to point out various principles of organisation, but by the majority of careful readers the poem is still regarded as disjunct. That The Bridge does contain serious internal contradictions seems indisputable. Some of these contradictions can, however, be accounted for by an exploration of the circumstances of its composition over a period of seven years. During this time Crane changed from the excited, confident adolescent who had just completed "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" into the prematurely aged libertine who could hardly discipline himself to write the poem's final sections.

In February 1923 the idea had taken shape in Crane's mind of "a new longish poem under the title of The Bridge which carries on further the tendencies manifest in "F and H'.² This statement suggests that initially his poem was to be yet another projection of the will from the real to the ideal, and that the particular American situation was secondary. Very soon, however, we have evidence of an ambition to unify the American experience. These four lines were sent to Allen Tate:

Macadam, gun grey as the tunny's pelt,
Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate,
For first it was the road, the road only
We heeded in joint piracy and pushed.³

And in greater detail he explained to Gorham Munson:

Very roughly, it concerns a mystical synthesis of "America". History and fact, location, etc., all have to be transfigured into abstract form that would almost function independently of its subject matter. The initial impulses of "our people" will have to be gathered up toward the climax of the bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity, in which is included also our scientific hopes and achievements of the future.⁴

The Bridge is to be a consensus of past American experience guiding the present towards "our constructive future". A Nietzschean assertion of the will and the Platonic resolution of fragmented reality are now conjoined with a sense of national destiny, learnt from Whitman through Munson and Waldo Frank.⁵ Fired by the ecstatic love affair which he was enjoying at this time, Crane's optimistic idealism spreads from a narrow vision of a merely personal destination until it covers the whole horizon of America. His own quest was now identified with that of America, on her road to becoming, as Whitman had expressed it, "divine Mother not only of material but spiritual worlds, in ceaseless succession through time".⁶ "I have lost the last shreds of philosophical pessimism", he announced in March.⁷The Bridge was thus conceived as a testament of unwavering optimism—an optimism which was not directed towards any particular end, but which was a state of mind; and consequently it was the exultant finale, later to be entitled "Atlantis", which absorbed all his energies at the beginning. The rest was to be a record of the unbroken, upward ascent to that climax. Here then are the seeds of the first internal confusion; originally Crane did not prepare for a journey through the hells of "Southern Cross" and "The Tunnel".

After a three months' lull, while he sampled the delights and excitements of his escape from the provinces into New York, in July he found himself driven again before a storm of irresistible creative force, and variant drafts of the final section were dispatched to Alfred Stieglitz and Charlotte Rychtarik. Ouspensky and Blake had now contributed their part to the span of the bridge, and Crane's letter to Stieglitz was a rhapsodic improvisation upon the theme of Ouspensky's "new order of consciousness", and of Blake's dictum that "what is now proved was once only imagined".⁸"The Bridge seems to me so beautiful... sheer ecstasy", he confided to Charlotte Rychtarik.⁹ So far all was going smoothly, with regard to both the poem's conception and its composition. The Bridge was to be a celebration of personal and national aspiration towards some kind of constructive future, "that fills us and renews us as a sun".¹⁰ He was "perfectly sure that it will be finished within a year".¹¹ There seemed to be no impediments, practical or intellectual, in July 1923.

Yet, within a month he had lost grip of the poem and was not to regain any semblance of control for almost three years. On 25 August, tormented by the heat, he had already "been in such despair about The Bridge for some time".¹² And though the winter passed with few references to the poem, we are left in no doubt that he was deeply troubled by his inability to make any progress, when we hear him exclaiming to Charlotte Rychtarik in March that "I would to God that I could get more done on my poem, to be called The Bridge".¹³ It was in April 1924 that he both entered upon the love affair which inspired the "Voyages" sequence and took up residence at 110 Columbia Heights, overlooking Brooklyn Harbour. This happy love relationship gave a serenity to his gaze as he looked out over the Brooklyn water-front; and undoubtedly it was at this time, and in the autumn when he was at work upon "Voyages", that there came to him many of the impressions and images which were later to find their way into "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" and "The Harbor Dawn".¹⁴ But of concerted work upon The Bridge there was none; merely a frustrated, petulant reminder to his mother in September, from the cage of a time-consuming job, that "a poem like [The Bridge] needs unbroken time and extensive concentration, and my present routine of life permits me only fragments".¹⁵Apart from such lamentations, there is hardly a mention of The Bridge in his correspondence until in desperation he approached Otto Kahn inDecember 1925.

During these two and a half years the poem had become something of a white elephant. His desire to write "a great American poem" was known to all his friends, who were continually curious about its progress. But, driven by the need to earn a living, he could find no time to work consistently upon it, only plenty of time in which to be depressed by its fragmentary condition. When he wrote his letter to Kahn, seeking means of escaping that economic enslavement which he felt must be the primary cause of the poem's failure to progress, he pleaded:

I have had to work at it very intermittently, between night and morning, and while shorter efforts can be more successfully completed under such crippling circumstances, a larger conception such as this poem, The Bridge, aiming as it does to enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America, requires a more steady application and less interruption than my circumstances have yet granted me to give it.¹⁶

This letter was successful in obtaining from Kahn the generous loan of $2,000 which enabled him to retreat to a haven in the country. Here, relieved of economic pressure, within a very short time he was busily revising the final section and wrestling with "Ave Maria". The bridge as symbol had already developed some of its multiplicity, and with only "Atlantis" in any state of completion it had become "a ship, a world, a woman, a tremendous harp".¹⁷ All of these symbolic strands would have to be woven into the whole.

Throughout the early months of 1926 he stuck limpet-like to the poem and on 18 March sent a further progress report to Otto Kahn. There was still very little of The Bridge visible, only "about one hundred lines": but he had now a much clearer idea than previously of how the poem was to proceed section by section, and of the thematic part that each section was to play:

. . . . Mid-ocean is where the poem begins. It concludes at midnight—at the center of Brooklyn Bridge. Strangely enough that final section of the poem has been the first to be completed,—yet there's a logic to it after all; it is the mystic consummation toward which all the other sections of the poem converge. Their contents are implicit in its summary. . . .

There are so many interlocking elements and symbols at work throughout The Bridge that it is next to impossible to describe it without resorting to the actual metaphors of the poem. Roughly, however, it is based on the conquest of space and knowledge. The theme of "Cathay" (its riches, etc.) ultimately is transmuted into a symbol of consciousness, knowledge, spiritual unity. A rather religious motivation, albeit not Presbyterian. The following notation is a very rough abbreviation of the subject matter of the several sections:

I. Columbus—Conquest of space, chaos.

II. Pocahontas—The natural body of America—fertility, etc.

III. Whitman—The spiritual body of America. (A dialogue between Whitman and a dying soldier in a Washington hospital; the infraction of physical death, disunity, on the concept of immortality.)

IV. John Brown.

(Negro porter on Calgary Express making up berths and singing to himself (a jazz form for this) of his sweetheart and the death of John Brown, alternately.)

V. Subway—The encroachment of machinery on humanity; a kind of purgatory in relation to the open sky of the last section.

VI. The Bridge—A sweeping dithyramb in which the Bridge becomes the symbol of consciousness spanning time and space.

The first and last sections are composed of blank verse with occasional rhymesfor accentuation. The verbal dynamics used and the spacious periodicity of the rhythm result in an unusually symphonic form. What forms I shall use for the other sections will have to be determined when I come to grips with their respective themes. . . .

As I cannot think of my work in terms of time I cannot gauge when it will be completed, probably by next December, however.¹⁸

The Bridge is to record "the conquest of space and knowledge", and will become "a symbol of consciousness, knowledge, spiritual unity . . . spanning time and space". The direction of the poem is still towards "the height beyond despair", a journey undertaken still in the evident company of Nietzsche, Plato, Ouspensky, Blake, and Whitman. But unable, with any intellectual integrity, to disregard the private hells he had so often visited during the last three years, Crane has made arrangements for a ride on the purgatorial subway.

This explanation of aims was sent to Kahn in the third week of March. During the remainder of his stay at Patterson he felt the poem gradually eluding his grasp, until by the end of April he was approaching a desperation about the project as acute as ever before. After his row with the Tates, he set sail for the Isle of Pines, in the hope that a complete change of scenery might stimulate his poetic nerve. If he could not write his poem in the time of economic freedom which Kahn's loan had granted him, it would never be written. He had for too long consoled himself with the belief that all he needed was time. He muttered ominously to the Rychtariks: "I realise it's hard for [my mother] to think of me as so far way [on the Isle of Pines]—but I'll be still farther away, I think, if my Bridge breaks down entirely".¹⁹ Something substantial had to be produced very soon if Crane was not to collapse into a dangerous and total despair. He was saved from such a descent into the depths by an unprecedented fluidity of poetic invention in the third week of July. Within a month he rescued The Bridge from impending oblivion and wrote almost half of one of the major long poems of the century.

At this point it would seem appropriate to turn from the circumstances of the poem's composition and to look at some of the works from which Crane drew ideas for the construction of his bridge; for by July 1926, he had absorbed all the influences, conscious and unconscious, sympathetic and antipathetic, which had effect upon the development of his poem.

His thought had for so long been imbued with Platonic, Nietzschean, Ouspenskian, and Blakeian elements that nothing that is not repetitive can be added. All of these teachers play as large a part in the conception of The Bridge, as they have played in the making of the shorter, lyric poems. Inspired by an Ouspenskian optimism and a Blakeian vision, the protagonist drives himself across the bridge with a Nietzschean exercise of the will towards the divine harmony of "Atlantis", which takes its epigraph from Plato's Symposium. In these respects the psychological and metaphysical premises supporting The Bridge are no different from those on which were founded the poems of White Buildings.

The full impact of Whitman, however, has so far not been felt. Crane had long thought himself "directly connected" with Whitman, but apart from "Voyages", which have certain affinities with "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", the self-involved lyrics of White Buildings were only peripherally influenced by the singer of nineteenth-century "Modern Man". The Bridge was a different matter altogether.

Crane was thoroughly familiar with the whole of Leaves of Grass,²⁰ but he was most clearly indebted to the imagery and symbolic devices of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and to some of the assumptions of "Passage to India" and of the prose essay, Democratic Vistas. Crane's poem opens with a seagull gradually disappearing from sight into the upper air:

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away.. . .

Traversing the same stretch of river in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", Whitman

Watched the Twelfth-month seagulls, saw them
high in
the air floating with motionless wings,
oscillating their
bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their
bodies
and left the rest in strong shadow,
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual
edging
toward the south. . . .

And playing a similar part to "The Tunnel" in The Bridge is the sixth section of Whitman's poem, where he confesses to times of doubt, despair with self, and spiritual defeat:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem'd to me blank and
suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they
not in
reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil. . . .

From "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" Crane must have derived not only particular elements (the star, bird, flower, and song, which are common to both poems), but also and especially the intricate symbolic and imagistic organisation. In an exactly similar manner at the conclusion of each poem are these elements gathered up and "twined" together in a transcendent unity. Whitman exults over the

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of
my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk
and dim.

Likewise (though with significantly less certainty) does Crane address his prayer

So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,
Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star
That bleeds infinity—the orphie strings,
Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge:
—One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay,
Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring
The serpent with the eagle in the leaves ... ?

Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.

With Democratic Vistas The Bridge shares an urgent optimism in spite of a like conviction that there was never "more hollowness at heart than at present";²¹ it answers Whitman's call for "a class of bards who will, now and ever, . . . link and tally the rational physical being of man, with the ensembles of time and space"; it obeys his imperative that "faith, very old, now scared away by science, must be restored, brought back by the very power that caused her departure"; and finally, it attempts to build that path, proclaimed in the closing sentences of the essay, "upward into superior realms", where America will be "divine Mother not only of material but spiritual worlds, in ceaseless succession through time". To some extent The Bridge was written by one half-believing that he was the "divine literatus", to whom in Democratic Vistas Whitman had played John the Baptist.

As for "Passage to India", it is almost a preliminary abstract of The Bridge—withthe conspicuous omission of the infernal chapters. "Cape Hatteras", whose epigraph is taken from "Passage to India", is the section most obviously inspired by the earlier poem. It concludes with Whitman taking Crane by the hand, just as Whitman in his own poem had dreamed of the time when "the Elder Brother found,/ The Younger melts in fondness in his arms". But similarities are not limited to "Cape Hatteras", which after all is intended as a kind of beatification of the Good Gray Poet.

Whitman had begun "Passage to India",

Singing my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong light works of engineers,
Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous
Seven
outvied),
In the Old World the east the Suez canal,
The New by its mighty railroad spann'd,
The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;
Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with
thee O soul,
The Past! The Past! The Past!

Crane's Bridge has as its centrepiece Roebling's great achievement of strong and graceful engineering, and from there plunges westwards into the continent by a mighty railroad in search of the past. Whitman continues to evoke

Not you alone proud truths of the world,
Not you alone ye facts of modern science,
But myths and fables of eld, Asia's, Africa's
fables ...

Likewise, Crane pays heed not only to the "facts of modern science" in "Cap e Hatteras", but also in "Powhatan's Daughter" attempts to recapture the "fables of eld", the myths of those Indians who were thought by the first discoverers to be inhabitants of Asia.

Again, Whitman depicts Columbus as "a visionary,/ With majestic limbs and pious beaming eyes". It is the same Columbus who gazes out towards Spain in "Ave Maria". But Whitman, for all his experience of the Civil War and his warnings against corruption and betrayal sounded in Democratic Vistas, had been able to believe that America was still true to Columbus's vision:

Ah, Genoese thy dream! thy dream!
Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave,
The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.

For Crane, who half a century later had often felt "disgust at America and everything in it",²² there could be no such certainty; and this is the point at which Whitman's influence upon Crane's poem becomes very much a complicating factor.

"Passage to India" was impelled by an optimism, unadulterated and unqualified, and by a faith in movement for movement's sake. The poem concludes with an exhortation to

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou
with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared
to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
O my brave soul !
O farther farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of
God?
O farther, farther, farther sail!

This invocation presumes a state of continual progress—progress undefined, unspecified, outwards, upwards, farther.²³ In the spring of 1923, when The Bridge was first mooted and when Crane felt that he had "lost the last shreds of philosophical pessimism", such a perspective of history was wholly attractive tohim. In The Bridge, as the first manuscript drafts demonstrate, he intended to sail farther, farther, farther, to "India" or "Cathay". And over the six and a half years of the poem's composition he never seriously doubted that this was the way the poem should end.

Yet in these years, Whitman's exhortations notwithstanding, the shore Columbus found had often, against Crane's explicit philosophical will, verified a nightmare rather than a dream. In consequence, before Cathay was reached, the dictates of psychological reality demanded a trial by agony in the tunnel of Hades. In The Bridge the journey into the tunnel is all too convincing; it seems the necessary and only possible direction for Crane's twentieth-century America; it is a metaphor for Crane's personal, real, and incontrovertible experience. Conversely, the emergence from the tunnel fails to convince, save as a miracle of wish-fulfilment, because it answers only to the requirements of a philosophical optimism that was no longer immediately available to Crane. This makes for a crucial flaw in The Bridge; and the flaw is the result of a man trying to write a poem to a programme, dictated by another, in which he could not fully believe. If Whitman may take credit for providing much of the pattern and overall conception of The Bridge, the simplistic progressivism of "Passage to India" is also partly to blame for the most serious internal contradiction in Crane's poem.

Whitman was not, of course, Crane's sole guide in the writing of his poem. As soon as Kahn's loan had allowed him to engage in the leisurely planning of his project, he set out on a course of systematic reading, always with one eye on his notebook for The Bridge. "I've read considerably", he told Munson in March 1926:

Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, Journal of Columbus, a book on Magellan by Hildebrand (this was rather inexcusable), Melville's delightful White Jacket as well as a marvelously illustrated book on whaling and whaling ships, published by the Marine Research Society, Salem, Mass. ... In the midst of my readings of Science and the Modern World, Whitehead,—along comes Virgin Spain. I'm about half way through this at present and feel like telegraphing Waldo [Frank] my immediate uncontrolled and unstinted enthusiasm. As prose it certainly is his climax of excellence—and as a document of the epic one of the most lively testaments ever written. I had been dwelling with a good deal of surprise in a pleasant conviction that Lawrence's Plumed Serpent was a masterpiece of racial description. It certainly is vividly beautiful, its landscapes, theatrical vistas, etc.—but Waldo's work is a world of true reality—his ritual is not a mere invention.²⁴

"Ave Maria", in both its narrative framework and its vocabulary, draws heavily upon Prescott and upon Columbus's Journal; and in "Cutty Sark" the sailor in his drunken meanderings babbles of desolate coasts and lifeless expanses of sea not unknown to Melville in fact or in imagination. From Whitehead Crane drew no details of his poem or of his thought to which we can point with accuracy: but the mathematician-philosopher's general thesis—his substitution of a monistic "organism" for a dualistic concept of mind and matter—must have been reassuring to a man continually perplexed and tortured by dualism.

More directly influential was Lawrence, "Powhatan's Daughter" obviously being written by a man familiar with both The Plumed Serpent and Studies in Classic American Literature. In the latter work it is particularly the two chapters on Cooper that are of relevance. At times here Lawrence exactly describes the reasons for and the nature of the quest that the protagonist undertakes in "The River" and "The Dance":

Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.

The Red Man died hating the white man. What remnant of him lives, lives hating the white man. Go near the Indians, and you must feel it. As far as we are concerned, the Red Man is subtly and unremittingly diabolic. Even when he doesn't know it. He is dispossessed in life, and unforgiving. He doesn't believe in usand our civilisation, and so is our mystic enemy, for we push him off the face of the earth. . . .

The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. At present the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act within the unconscious or under-conscious soul of the white American, causing the great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness sometimes.²⁵

Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape.

But probably, one day America will be as beautiful in actuality as it is in Cooper. Not yet, however. When the factories have fallen down again.²⁶

On other occasions he lays his finger very nearly upon one of the fundamental contradictions which undermined Crane's poem—and indeed more than his poem:

The white man's mind and soul are divided between these two things: innocence and lust, the Spirit and Sensuality. Sensuality always carries a stigma, and is therefore more deeply desired, or lusted after. But spirituality alone gives the sense of uplift, exaltation, and "winged life", with the inevitable reaction into sin and spite. So the white man is divided against himself. He plays off one side of himself against the other side, till it is really a tale told by an idiot, and nauseating.²⁷

If such a paragraph cannot properly be classified as influential, it does in retrospect appear as a disturbingly accurate prediction.

It is to Frank, however, that Crane owes greatest debt, and not so much to Virgin Spain as to an earlier work, Our America, which he had first read several years beforehand.²⁸ Isolated ideas from Frank's effulgent rhapsody on medieval Spain undoubtedly affected Crane deeply. For instance, Frank's notion of a bridge as "a force lifting the broken things of Spain in a great dance Godward"²⁹ effectively describes the function that Crane's Brooklyn Bridge is intended to possess in contemporary America. And the dialogue between Cervantes and Columbus, with which Virgin Spain closes, is one that Crane frequently conducted within himself.³⁰ It is an argument between a despair over all things American, voiced by the pessimistic Cervantes, and Columbus's refusal to give up hope. The Bridge, with "The Tunnel" opening on to "Atlantis", continues this tense debate.

Nonetheless, it is to Our America that The Bridge is chiefly similar, not merely in details, but in premise, substance, and design. In both works there is the same sense of the "body of America" and of the need to rediscover a blood-consciousness of it such as the Indians supposedly had felt. To this end Crane wrote "Powhatan's Daughter", and Frank advised his readers to

Try, as you read these pages about the spirit of our world, to bear in mind [its] body. . . . America is a land with a shrieking rhythm. . . . Centuries ago, a balance to this autochthonous rapture was achieved in the Indian civilisation.³¹

And in his chapter, "The Land of Buried Cultures", Frank predicts the annihilation of the proud Indian in a passage that might well serve as a gloss to Crane's "The Dance":

The Indian will be destroyed. . . . [But] he withdraws forever farther within himself. He makes his sanctuary of silent meditation deeper from the encroachment of the hostile human world. And holding up his head, he meets the storm.³²

As for Whitman, he is as important a symbol of faith and purpose to Frankas he is to Crane in "Cape Hatteras":

America therefore is holy land to us. Not because Whitman stood upon it, but because we have faith that there is meaning in the fact that Whitman stood upon it.³³

Turning to the twentieth century, we find that, like Crane, Frank believes that from the dark night of the national soul there is yet possibility of a triumphant emergence, for Chicago (his equivalent to Crane's Manhattan) "is still fluent, still chaotic, [but] in the black industrial cloak are still interstices of light". Despair has "not altogether won".³⁴ Crane's visionary "Atlantis", his celebration of spiritual victory in the midst of this black industrial chaos, has its parallel in Our America in a composite of numerous, scattered ideas—of America as the new "mystic word" (cf. Crane's "multitudinous Verb"), as a country "consciously engaged in spiritual pioneering", and as a land of poets and seers whose sacred duty it is "to lift America into self knowledge that shall be luminous so that she may shine, vibrant so that she may be articulate".³⁵ Finally, there is a similarity of most general intention. It was Frank's aim in writing his history "to suggest a vast movement by scanty lines that shall somehow catch up the density of life between them".³⁶ Crane's historical lines were so scanty as to omit all mention of the War of Independence and almost all of the Civil War, but somewhere in the vast movement the density of past and present life was caught.

There are certainly sharp differences between these two men in a number of respects. Crane, for instance, is considerably less moralistic than Frank and less convinced of the efficacy of any kind of social revolution; and America's Jewish heritage plays no vital role in The Bridge, as it does in Our America. But these differences apart, the two works read almost as if they were entries for some literary prize in either prose or verse under the title of "The Myth of America".

Another entry for this hypothetical competition might have been William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, which had been published in 1925. Crane, perhaps conscious of the extent to which The Bridge had already followed the pattern of another man's work, namely Our America, postponed reading it until Autumn, 1926, when "I felt my own way cleared beyond chance of confusions incident to reading a book so intimate to my theme".³⁷ He went on to say how interested he was "to note that he puts Poe and his "character' in the same position as I had symbolised for him in 'The Tunnel' section". Having chosen Poe as archetypal prisoner in a mechanised hell, he was perhaps thinking in particular of this paragraph from In the American Grain:

It is especially in the poetry where "death looks gigantically down' that the horror of the formless resistance which opposed, maddened, destroyed him has forced its character into the air, the wind, the blessed galleries of paradise, above a morose, dead world, peopled by shadows and silence, and despair—It is the compelling force of his isolation.³⁸

If the similarity in their treatments of Poe was coincidental, it seems certain that in one respect Crane was indebted to Williams at least for reassurance. Williams's chapter, "De Soto and the New World", is presented in the form of a love-skirmish between an enthralled De Soto and an irresistible "She", the feminine spirit of the continent. The continent is a temptress, a fatal woman who beckons an insatiable and obsessed De Soto deeper and deeper into her Indian womb, where finally, unvanquished, she destroys the Spaniard. From "Harbor Dawn" to "The Dance" the protagonist of The Bridge is engaged in a like infatuated pursuit of the female continental body, until he too is consumed in her fiery, Indian embrace. Since these sections were all composed or radically revised after Crane's reading of In the American Grain, it seems reasonable to suppose that they were influenced conceptually by Williams's "De Soto and the New World".³⁹

There is one thinker whose part in the building of The Bridge must be mentioned, although his writings acted less as an inspiration towards the exultant climaxthan as an impediment. This was Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West Crane seems to have dipped into from time to time throughout his life.

The history of Crane's reactions to Spengler demonstrates how completely intellectual systems were for him but the objectifications of emotional states. When all was well with the world, he was only too delighted to have Spengler's pessimistic thesis of cultural decay refuted. In January 1927 he was expressing his gratitude to Frank for "your review of Spengler. It's a magnificent rebuttal of the man's psychology."⁴⁰ The sigh of relief audible here suggests the fateful attraction Spengler's ideas had for Crane in times of emotional distress, when the ecstatic upper air was obscured from view. He was most susceptible in periods of creative drought. Thus was he captured by Spengler in June 1926, on the Isle of Pines. Once again it was Frank who was asked to overhear his confusion:

At times it seems demonstrable that Spengler is quite right. At present—I'm writing nothing—would that I were an efficient factory of some kind! .. . I think that the artist more and more licks his own vomit, mistaking it for the common diet. He amuses himself that way in a culture without faith and convictions—but he might as well be in elfin land with a hop pipe in his mouth. . . . No, The Bridge isn't very flamboyant these days.⁴¹

A letter written the very next day to the same correspondent has more to say about his poem's temporary lack of flamboyance:

The form of [The Bridge] 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 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, behaviorism and toothpicks.⁴²

In such moments Crane sees with a painful clarity the fissure in the plan, let alone the completed work, of The Bridge. The present, which seemed squalid and trivial to him, broke the link between his idealised past of Pocahontas and Whitman and his future with its promise of Cathay. There was no way of relating the reality of contemporary America with its envisaged ideal. If this "new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America" were to omit all reference to the infernal regions of America and of his American self, the poem would be merely a complacent, compensatory, and sentimental dream. Yet if the protagonist were to visit the depths, as for the poem to be valid he must, there would be no means of emergence save on the wings of the idealist's will to aspire—wings manufactured not in the reality of the depths but in the visionary world of the imagination. The real and the ideal could not be bridged, as they had not been even in his early adolescence, when he had written poems alternately ecstatic and despairing.

Spengler was not, of course, responsible for this schism. He had not made miserable Crane's childhood, just as that childhood's moments of joy and release had not been learnt from Whitman. But what Spengler did was to provide some sort of explanatory system or rationale at times when the path of vision was hidden. However, just as there was no emotional balance in Crane's life, only violent alternations, so there was no synthesis of Spengler and Whitman. Depression sank Crane in the horrors of the material world, where he took a masochistic delight in being a dedicated Spenglerian; when the depression lifted, Spengler faded in the bright Whitmanic dawn. Thus in The Bridge one might say that Spengler led Crane into "The Tunnel". Somewhere in that subterranean purgatory Spengler vanished from Crane's sight. But he vanished only in the sense that Crane had shut his eyes to external reality; it was in the world of an inward vision that the poet made passage to Cathay.⁴³

For two months after his arrival on the Isle of Pines Crane was held in the grip of this Spenglerian pessimism. He was immensely excited by the more luscious aspects of tropical scenery, and by the heightened effects of sea and sky: but, since he was unable to continue work on The Bridge, his predominant state of mind was analogous less to the exotic Isle of Pines than to its barren neighbour, Grand Cayman, which he visited in the middle of June, to find it "flat and steaming under black clouds of mosquitoes, and not a square inch of screening on the island".⁴⁴ At this time Crane felt himself being reduced inexorably to a similar, devitalised condition. "I have not been able to write one line since I came", he told a friend at the beginning of July. "The mind is completely befogged by the heat . . . I've lost all faith in my material".⁴⁵ This letter ended with an abject submission to a hedonistic nihilism: "Let my lusts be my ruin, since all else is a fake and mockery". It seemed that a poet and his major poem had both evaporated in the tropical heat.

Then suddenly, a miracle .. . a creative downpour. The lull of months, the unfulfilled promise of years, came to an end in a furious storm of poetic activity. On 24 July, a poet reborn and saved, he began his letter to Waldo Frank: "Hail brother! I feel an absolute music in the air again, and some tremendous rondure floating somewhere";⁴⁶ and in the month that followed he was constantly at work either on The Bridge or on several fine, short lyrics capturing the spiritual atmosphere of the tropics. Never before or again was Crane driven by so powerful a creative force. "I'm simply immersed in work to my neck, eating, 'sleeping ', and breathing it", he told his mother.⁴⁷ With Frank at this time he kept up a stream of correspondence, a description of work in progress, that rivalled the flow of his poetry: "I feel as though I were dancing on dynamite these days—so absolute and elaborated has become the conception. All sections moving forward now at once! I didn't realise that a bridge is begun from the two ends at once."⁴⁸ And on another occasion there came to him this marvellous image of the earlier stages of the creative process: "It is very pleasant to lie awake—just half awake—and listen. I have the most speechless and glorious dreams meanwhile. Sometimes words come and go, presented like a rose that yields only its light, never its complete form."⁴⁹

This spell in a creator's paradise lasted a little over a month. By the end of August seven sections were either complete or awaiting revision of only minor details: "Proem", "Ave Maria", "Cutty Sark", "Southern Cross", "National Winter Garden", "The Tunnel", and "Atlantis". In addition, "The Dance" and "Virginia" were written at least in part at this time. "Indiana" was conceived, and there is also a reference to a "Calgary Express" as being "largely finished".⁵⁰

By September 1926 Crane had good cause to be exhilarated and hopeful. He had written the major part of The Bridge, and if the co-ordination of the whole was still an achievement for the future, he felt that so far "what has been done . . . is superb".⁵¹ All the completed sections had been written out of a necessity to create and in obedience to an internally-directed imperative, not out of a necessity to implement a theoretical programme, like some of the later work. Now he believed he could finish the poem by the following May (1927);⁵² and there was no strong reason to suppose that the remaining sections, now merely links, would not fall into shape and place with a similar ease and assurance.

In the autumn he returned first to New York, and then to Patterson. Summer's deluge of creativity was over, but it had left him with a conviction that if it could happen once it could happen a second time. "I'm not worried", he asserted to Frank in November. "I know too well what I want to do now, even if it doesn't spill over for months and months. It must 'spill ', you know."⁵³ Yet within a month, with an abrupt swing of the emotional pendulum, he was deposited once more in a pit of dejection. He recanted his so recent confidence and confessed to a fear that "it may be too late, already, for me to complete the conception [of The Bridge]. My mind is about as clear as dirty dishwater."⁵⁴

What had happened was that he had once again become enmeshed in a web of chaos, emanating from his mother. Her problem at the moment was that after only seven months her second marriage was ending in divorce.⁵⁵ "It is a very melancholy Christmas for all of us . . . I am certainly anything but joyful" observed Crane, in a tone less of sympathetic sorrow than of weary disillusionment with her whom he had once described as a queen of the spirit.⁵⁶ It would be wrong to suggestthat either this unhappy turn of events or the general painful relations that he had with his mother during the next two years was any kind of direct impediment to the progress of The Bridge. But in times of inactivity, as in this last month of 1926, any sympathy was accentuated, any depression aggravated, and any reserve strength sapped by the considerable emotional demands made on him by his mother.

A slight counterbalance to the damage wrought by family confusions was provided by the publication in December of White Buildings. Crane was delighted to find that nearly all the reviews were favourable;⁵⁷ and what gave him particular pleasure—the New World still seeking the approval of the Old—was the unexpectedly enthusiastic notice in The Times Literary Supplement.⁵⁸ Of the literary journals, only The Dial had important reservations.⁵⁹ It was a most encouraging reception for a first book of poems, and it certainly helped him resist any acute despair during the early months of 1927.

In these months, between trips from Patterson to New York in search of excessive or eccentric pleasures, Crane was working off and on at The Bridge. By February he had added to the previous sections "The Harbor Dawn" and "The Dance". Over the next three months he managed to write little and by May could no longer hide from himself the fear that he might be losing sight of the grand conception of his poem. He announced to his mother that "this next month must see something accomplished on The Bridge or I shall be completely discouraged".⁶⁰Something was accomplished within that month, and July saw the completion of "Van Winkle" and "The River", on which section he had "worked harder and longer . . . than any other".⁶¹ Twelve of the eventual fifteen sections were now finished and had been submitted for publication as single poems to a number of literary magazines.⁶²He knew that there remained to write only "Indiana", "Cape Hatteras", and whatever would come as the link between "Three Songs" and "The Tunnel".⁶³ It seemed that at the latest he could "get it all done by December".⁶⁴

When he approached Otto Kahn for a further loan in September, he told him that, "although I have found the subject to be vaster than I had at first realised, I am still highly confident of its final articulation into a continuous and eloquent span".⁶⁵ But in fact, even at the time of writing this letter, he was already climbing down from those heights of confidence. The major portion and the finest parts of The Bridge had been written in the twelve months that ended in July 1927. Temporary doubts there had been, but he had managed to maintain conceptual and structural command of his poem. Thereafter, he lost control, purpose, and direction in both his poetry and his personal life. Between the summer of 1927 and the summer of 1929 he wrote practically nothing, in verse or in prose, within or without The Bridge. He slipped from an irritable lethargy into a self-destructive irresponsibility, until he became a man living continually on the crumbling edge of disaster.

One of the factors contributing to this collapse was undoubtedly the fact that soon after his return to the United States in the autumn of 1926 his sense of economic and social dislocation once again became acute. He was unqualified for any work, such as school or university teaching, which might have allowed him extended periods of time in which to concentrate on writing. And though he had become, as he reminded Kahn, "a perfectly good advertising writer",⁶⁶ employment of this kind always exhausted him physically and mentally, so that consistent work on a large project was impossible. Kahn's loan had been the key out of this economic prison, and at least for the months of July and August 1926 this freedom had paid handsome dividends. However, Crane soon found that this liberty was not without its peculiar disadvantages. Such was his temperament that when poetry was not forthcoming, he faced within himself only a huge and intolerable emptiness, which even a copywriter's project might have enabled him temporarily to ignore. How pitifully ironic, and yet how comprehensible, that so often after entering the haven of Kahn's patronage, he recorded a desire to return to the cage of a daily job.

During his stay at Patterson from November 1926 to September 1927 Crane was always well-warmed and well-nourished, and bridge-building proceeded in fits and starts. But he could never quite stifle the anxiety (one of increasing vehemenceas the completion date of The Bridge was postponed from the autumn to December to the spring of 1928) about what would happen to both himself and his poem when the money ran out in the near future. He was the recipient of a small monthly cheque from his father, but the amount was essentially in the nature of an increment rather than of an income. Hence, throughout these months there are continual references in his letters to the necessity of finding a job; and hence, in September he approached Kahn again for a loan of "800 or 1,000 dollars". However, he was fully aware that any such loan would not alleviate his sense of social displacement. When unable to write, alone with a blank page, he would still feel that he was the inhabitant of a social limbo. He was caught in a cleft stick: equipped only for jobs which sapped his energies or which did not give him time to write poetry; outside the bondage of a job, doomed, when not writing, to feel totally superfluous, day in, week out. He saw himself as the text-book example of the romantic artist estranged from society, and it was as this representative displaced artist that he scolded Yvor Winters, who had demanded that the poet become again "the complete man", and take "his ethical place" as a functional member of society:

You need a good drubbing for all your recent easy talk. . . . As a matter of fact I'm all too ready to concede that there are several other careers more engaging to follow than that of poetry. But the circumstances of one's birth, the conduct of one's parents, the current economic structure of society and a thousand other local factors have as much or more to say about successions to such occupations, the naive volitions of the poet to the contrary. I agree with you, of course, that the poet should in as large a measure as possible adjust himself to society. But the question always will remain as to how far the conscience is justified in compromising with the age's demands.⁶⁷

Thus, in 1927, in that America whose myth he claimed to be composing, the mythmaker found himself socially irrelevant. From Patterson, during the spring and summer, whenever the frustration and the weight of superfluity became unbearable, he escaped to lose himself in delirious pleasure in the bars and along the waterfronts of New York. Sobriety meant only a despair with all things American, and he admitted

How futile I feel most of the time, no matter what I do or conceive of doing, even. Part of the disease of modern consciousness, I suppose. There is no standard of values in the modern world—it's mostly slop, priggishness, and sentimentality.⁶⁸

By September, with the day of financial reckoning approaching, rather than work in America his sights were set on Mexico or Mallorca.⁶⁹ In the end he took a job as secretary to a stockbroker, that foremost contributor to the design of the "diseased" American twentieth century, and in November accompanied his new employer to Los Angeles, a city which by its fiercer critics has been seen as the apotheosis of "slop and sentimentality". This particular employment was not likely, for long, to solve his profound inner confusions about the artist in contemporary America.

He remained in Southern California for six months until May 1928. Only three of these were spent in the singularly undemanding employ of the stockbroker, Mr Herbert Wise. Thereafter he lingered in the area "with the hope of securing some "literary' connection with the movies".⁷⁰ But the attempts to establish such a connexion were very half-hearted, and the hope therefore unfulfilled.

In all, this stay on the West Coast was little short of disastrous. Within two weeks he had found that "one can't seem to wake up here without the spur of scotch or gin".⁷¹ He might have added that, let alone wake up, he could not continue through the day without incessant alcoholic spurs. Unfortunately, he did not confine his drinking to the comparative safety of a private residence, but wandered to the sailors' bars on the San Pedro water-front. It was on one such excursion in March that Crane and a friend were beaten up and robbed of all they possessed. The quieter moments snatched from drinking and the seeking out of agreeable sailors Crane appears to have spent reading. There was more fiction on his reading-list than usual, but his chief joy was the discovery of Hopkins'spoetry, which "terribly excited" him and affected the revision of what was ultimately his most Hopkinsesque poem, "The Hurricane".⁷² But of progress on The Bridge there was none. "Writing is next to impossible", he told Malcolm Cowley.⁷³ All he could do was to put the poem out of mind with alcohol and with the frantic pursuit of physical pleasure. Sobriety brought in the personal foreground only contemplation of prospective failure, and on the horizon a broken vista of moral chaos in that country his poem was to celebrate. As he wrote to Gorham Munson, when congratulating him on the publication of his Destinations:

The spiritual disintegration of our period becomes more painful to me every day, so much so that I now find myself baulked by doubt at the validity of practically every metaphor I coin.⁷⁴

If Southern California was America's future, he could not "imagine ever having anything to say . . . except in vituperation of the scene itself'.⁷⁵

By the time he left California it was a full nine months since he had added so much as a word to the twelve disjunct sections of The Bridge. He was now blind to the vision that had originally inspired the poem, and deaf to that "absolute music" he had heard on the Isle of Pines. He had lost confidence in his own poetic abilities and lost belief in the subject of his poem. The Bridge rose out of his mind's barren plateau, magnificent, useless.

He returned to New York by way of New Orleans in the middle of May, embarrassed by his renowned but uncompleted poem, and still claiming to his friends that it would be finished during the summer.⁷⁶ But the depths of the hopelessness to which he had in fact sunk can be gauged from his confession to Wilbur Underwood that "there's nothing left to struggle for except "respectability'. Occasionally some sailor gives me a jolt—but I guess I'm getting old."⁷⁷ The summer saw neither the completion of The Bridge nor an improvement in his general emotional state. "What a hell the last two years have been", was his verdict in October. "I haven't had a creative thought for so long that I feel quite lost."⁷⁸

As usual economics had been one of the engines of this hell. Any remnants of energy and enthusiasm vanished as he tramped New York's humid streets in search of work. A cheque from his father helped him out in August, and in the autumn he obtained in succession temporary jobs in a bookshop and an advertising agency.⁷⁹ But such an existence afforded him none of the security required for consistent work on a long poem.

This security was not even achieved in September when his beloved grandmother died, leaving him a bequest of $5,000. It was true that for the first time in his life he had behind him a considerable sum of money, which was unquestionably his own rather than a loan from a patron or a gift with invisible strings from his father. But the complications attendant upon the receiving of this inheritance effectively sabotaged any stability which the bequest ought to have brought.

Over the past two years Crane had become increasingly irked by his mother's possessiveness and by her desire to dominate and mould him in every way possible. This irritation had become acute in Hollywood, where she had joined him, and where later in relief he had left her. Obviously, if Crane had not been bound to his mother at a very deep emotional level, he could long before have severed the relationship, or, preferably, have guided it into happier, healthier channels. But neither of these courses had he been capable of taking.

His grandmother's bequest brought matters to a head. Crane was perhaps indelicately, though understandably, eager to obtain the money. His mother was anxious lest her son's economic independence might strain the last threads of her hold over him. In Hollywood, she postponed signing the papers that would facilitate the release of the money, while, apparently feigning illness, she tried to coax him Westwards. In New York, Crane between drinking-bouts posted urgent demands for money to her and to the Trust Company. The affair deteriorated into a ferocious exchange of fantasic threats, until at length in November Crane, realising that in their relationship were mutually destructive elements that could not be exorcised, resolved never to see his mother again.⁸⁰ He informed anaunt that he was

now making a strong effort to discipline myself against the obsession with this and other wasteful family problems that have robbed me of my vitality during these last twenty years—unmanned me time and again . . . I won't be dragged into hell—and live there forever for anybody's joke—not even my mother's.⁸¹

In the end Crane obtained the money; and in December, with America offering only memories of intellectual confusion and emotional torment, he set sail for Europe. If his first aim in going was merely to put unpleasantness behind him, his second was of course to find somewhere he could work quietly on his poem. But the effort involved in cutting a particularly strong umbilical cord and in terminating the closest, if most contorted, relationship of his life proved to have left him little energy to spare for anything as demanding as The Bridge.

After a few days in London, he made the obligatory 1920s pilgrimage to Paris, where he was soon in touch with a large number to literary figures, French, English, and American. His chief interest, however, was in those who gave the wildest parties and who were most liberal with their whisky; and in Paris in 1929, for an expatriate American artist, there was one man who was unrivalled in these respects. This was Harry Crosby, millionaire, gambler, poet, amateur airman, and, most significant for Crane, publisher of de luxe editions. In the midst of a whirl of alcoholic activity Crane showed the completed sections of The Bridge to Crosby and his wife, Caresse. The Crosbys were so impressed with what they read that they begged Crane to let them publish immediately. And Crane agreed, so pessimistic was he now about the return of his poetic gifts, and so eager to be free of his burden. He was also tempted by the superb edition promised him; at least the volume might be a beautiful work of the printer's art, even if the contents were no more than a splendid wreck of literature.⁸² An explanation of his decision to Isidor Schneider demonstrates the extent to which in him despair had turned into an intellectually dishonest nonchalance:

I haven't so far completed so much as one additional section to The Bridge. It's coming out this fall in Paris, regardless. . . . If it eventuates that I have the wit or inspiration to add to it later—such additions can be incorporated in 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 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.⁸³

With these timid qualifications Crane launched his poem. The Bridge was given into the hands of its prospective publishers, not because its author wished to publish a book, merely because he wished to get rid of it.

After a gregarious, hectic spring in Paris, Crane travelled to the South of France in April. But the self-confrontation which a quiet solitude imposed upon him he could stand for only three weeks, before he was off again exploring the delights of the port of Marseilles. Back in Paris in July he was arrested for playing the leading part in a café brawl, and, after continuing the battle with the police, he was jailed and later fined. This fine exhausted the last of the money he had taken to Europe. Harry Crosby bought him a boat-ticket, and he sailed back to the United States, having written nothing during seven months in Europe. It was now six and a half years since he had begun The Bridge, three years since he had done any consistent work on it, and two years since he had written more than a "scratch note" for it.

Then, suddenly, in August 1929, in Patterson and Brooklyn, he was back at work on the poem in one last attempt to rescue it from the public show of fragmented disunity to which he had doomed it by his agreement to publish. He was writing now under no such inspiration as had magically come to him on the Isle of Pines; he was writing to fill in the gaps and to beat a publisher's dead-line. Small wonder that much of what he wrote at this time lacks the rhythmic flexibility andthe figurative flamboyance of the earlier sections; or that "Cape Hatteras" deteriorates into bombast and a shrill hysteria, as he strains every nerve to simulate an ecstasy which he no longer felt, but which the structure of the poem demanded at that point.

First came the gloss notes for "Ave Maria" and "Powhatan's Daughter", which he thought would be "a great help in binding together the general theme".⁸⁴Then he was co-ordinating various jottings he had made for "Cape Hatteras" and adding much that was new, until in September it looked "pretty good" to him.⁸⁵ "Indiana" and "Quaker Hill" were in progress, and on 17 September he predicted that he was within a week of finishing. But, sure enough, even at this stage his estimate was self-deceptive, and it was a full three months before on 26 December he was able to announce that "I'm hastily enclosing the final version of 'Quaker Hill ', which ends my writing on The Bridge".⁸⁶ In these three months the American economy had collapsed, and Harry Crosby had killed himself, leaving his wife to discharge the publishing commitments of The Black Sun Press. But at least, in the midst of these national and individual disasters, there was something to be relieved about: The Bridge was finished.

It was just under seven years between the conception of The Bridge and its completion. In February 1923 Crane had been the messenger of a free-wheeling optimism, with an intermittently megalomaniac confidence in his mission and in his poetic genius; in 1929 he was a self-contemptuous alcoholic, whose erotic ecstasies had become self-consciously barbaric lusts, whose only certainty was of his own failure and loss of talent, and whose "philosophic optimism" had been routed by a more or less steady conviction of general spiritual disintegration. The man who completed the poem shared few beliefs and attitudes with the man who had begun it. It is hardly surprising that the poem is not conspicuous for its coherence, its internal logic, and its consistency of development.

¹Letters, p. 141.

²Letters, p. 118. "F and H" is of course Crane's abbreviation for his "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen".

³Op. cit., p. 123. The first two lines of the verse quoted, with but one word altered ("belt" substituted for "pelt"), became the opening lines of "Van Winkle".

⁴Op. cit., p. 124.

⁵ See letter to Gorham Munson of 2 Mar. 1923 {Letters, p. 128): "Since my reading of you and Frank (I recently bought City Block) I begin to feel myself directly connected with Whitman".

⁶ The quoted words are from the final sentence of Democratic Vistas.

⁷Letters, p. 129.

⁸Op. cit., pp. 137-9.

⁹Op. cit., pp. 139-42.

¹⁰ The quoted words constitute a line from early drafts of the final section, later dropped. See Weber, Hart Crane, p. 427.

¹¹Letters, p. 141.

¹²Op. cit., p. 145.

¹³Op. cit., p. 178.

¹⁴Op. cit., pp. 181-3, 192, 198.

¹⁵Op. cit., p. 191.

¹⁶Op. cit., p. 223.

¹⁷Op. cit., p. 232.

¹⁸Op. cit., pp. 240-2. It will be noted that as yet there is no conception of the "Proem", and that the proposed Whitman and John Brown sections disappear, their places being taken by "Cutty Sark", "Cape Hatteras", "Three Songs", and "Quaker Hill". Of course, Whitman remains thematically central both to "Cape Hatteras" and to The Bridge as a whole, and the Calgary Express was presumably rendered superfluous by the Twentieth Century Express of "The River" section.

¹⁹Op. cit., p. 250.

²⁰ For instance, see his remark to Allen Tate (Letters, p. 354): "You've heard me roar at too many of Whitman's lines to doubt that I can spot his worst, I'm sure."

²¹ In this paragraph the four quoted phrases or sentences from Democratic Vistas are to be found in Whitman, Prose Works: Vol. 11, Collect and Other Prose, New York, 1964, respectively on pp. 369, 421, 421, 426.

²²Letters, p. 62.

²³ Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason, New York, 1947, p. 589, writing in a similar context on Whitman's influence on Crane, summarises Whitman's lesson, not unfairly, as follows: "We have no way of determining where we are going, but we should keep moving at all costs and as fast as possible; we have faith in progress."

²⁴Letters, pp. 235-6.

²⁵ D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. New York, 1951, p. 44. The work was first published in 1923.

²⁶Op. cit., p. 60.

²⁷Op. cit., p. 72.

²⁸ Crane had read Our America as long ago as December 1919 (see Letters, pp. 26-7). He commented at that time: "Waldo Frank's book IS a pessimistic analysis. The worst of it is, he has hit the truth so many times." But its "extreme national consciousness" troubled one who was still the composer chiefly of intensely personal lyrics.

²⁹ Waldo Frank, Virgin Spain: Scenes from the Spiritual Drama of a Great People. New York, 1926, p. 9.

³⁰Op. cit., pp. 295-301. Of course, I do not mean to imply that Frank invented the dialogue. It is almost as old as the colonisation of America. But Frank's re-enactment of it assuredly impressed Crane, whose Columbus is also the spokesman of hope and faith.

³¹ Waldo Frank, Our America. New York, 1919, p. 5.

³²Op. cit., p. 116.

³³Op. cit., p. 204.

³⁴Op. cit., p. 123.

³⁵Op. cit., pp. 3-10, passim.

³⁶Op. cit., p. 7.

³⁷Letters, pp. 277-8.

³⁸ William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain. New York, (New Directions) 1956, p. 231.

³⁹ The epigraph which Crane chose for "Powhatan's Daughter" is from William Strachey's The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia. However, almost certainly Crane did not take it from the original, but from the extract quoted by Williams in his chapter, "The May-pole at Merrymount".

⁴⁰Letters, p. 285.

⁴¹Op. cit., p. 259.

⁴²Op. cit., p. 261.

⁴³ Weber, Hart Crane, p. 286, suggests that Spengler was also sympathetic to Crane on account of his "high regard for the technique of analogy as a means of understanding", and for his "contempt for "reason and cognition' and the importance he attached to "intuitive perception' as the only means of comprehending metaphysical reality and the human future".

⁴⁴Letters, p. 258.

⁴⁵Op. cit., p. 264.

⁴⁶Op. cit., p. 267.

⁴⁷Op. cit., p. 269.

⁴⁸Op. cit., p. 270.

⁴⁹Op. cit., pp. 272-3.

⁵⁰Op. cit., p. 272. "Calgary Express" was probably later incorporated into the first part of "The River".

⁵¹Op. cit., p. 276.

⁵²Op. cit., pp. 269-70.

⁵³Op. cit., p. 277.

⁵⁴Op. cit., p. 280.

⁵⁵ The divorce was eventually granted, in his mother's favour, in the spring of 1927.

⁵⁶Letters, p. 280.

⁵⁷ See letter to Waldo Frank (Letters, p. 285): "WB's is getting—or is going to get—wonderful reviews. Not to mention yours [in The New Republic], there's a great explosion coming from Yvor Winters in The Dial; another from Mark Van Doren (of all the unexpected!) in The Nation this week. Seligmann has written a sincere and just estimate in the Sun; Josephson in the Herald-Tribune; Mcleish in Poetry . . ."

⁵⁸T.L.S., 24 Feb. 1927. See Letters, p. 295: "Altogether it's the most satisfactory newspaper mention we have had".

⁵⁹The Dial, LXXXII (February 1927), Crane was castigated for affectation of idiom, self-conscious preciosity, intellectual fakery, and an inability to write a satisfactory, complete poem. However, even here his blank verse measure was commended, but this slight qualification of disapproval was not enough to satisfy Crane, and he spent much of the spring railing at editors, in particular MarianneMoore of The Dial. For instance, see Letters, p. 289.

⁶⁰Letters, p. 297.

⁶¹Op. cit., p. 303.

⁶² By 1928 eleven of the twelve sections had been published: "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" in The Dial, June 1927; "Ave Maria" in The American Caravan, 1927; "The Harbor Dawn" in Transition, No. 3, (1927); "Van Winkle" in Transition, No. 7, (1927); "The River" in 2nd American Caravan, 1928; "The Dance" in The Dial, October 1927; "Cutty Sark" in Transition, No. 3 (1927); "Three Songs" in The Calendar, 1927; and "The Tunnel" in The Criterion, November 1927. Only "Atlantis" awaited the publication of The Bridge.

⁶³ See Weber, Hart Crane, p. 370: "Crane probably wrote ['Quaker Hill'] to take the place of three projected sections that were never completed—'The Cyder Flask ', "Calgary Express ', and "1927 Whistles!'

⁶⁴Letters, p. 303.

⁶⁵Op. cit., p. 308.

⁶⁶Ibid.

⁶⁷ This very interesting letter (Letters, pp. 298-302) should be read in its entirety. In addition to the extract cited, it contains discussions of "wholeness of personality", the artist's moral responsibilities, the homosexual artist, the structural weaknesses in Crane's poetry, and its metaphysical qualities.

⁶⁸ Letter to Wilbur Underwood, reprinted in Horton, Hart Crane, p. 235.

⁶⁹ See Letters, p. 309.

⁷⁰Op. cit., p. 318.

⁷¹Op. cit., p. 312.

⁷²Op. cit., p. 317.

⁷³Op. cit., p. 314.

⁷⁴Op. cit., p. 323.

⁷⁵Op. cit., p. 325.

⁷⁶Ibid.

⁷⁷ Letter reprinted in Horton, Hart Crane, p. 245. It is worth noting that he was still under thirty!

⁷⁸Letters, p. 329.

⁷⁹ Relations with his father improved as those with his mother deteriorated, not to the extent, however, of allowing him, even when virtually penniless, to accept a job his father had offered him. He was still too fearful of any emotional entanglements such a situation might entail.

⁸⁰ He kept this resolve never to see her again. His mother lived on until 30 Jul. 1947.

⁸¹ Letter reprinted in Horton, Hart Crane, pp. 248-9. See Horton, pp. 246-51, for a considerably more detailed account of this whole tawdry wrangle. Horton is as usual unduly generous towards Crane's mother.

⁸² The frontispiece was to have been a reproduction of Joseph Stella's paintingof Brooklyn Bridge, of which Crane wrote to Stella (Letters, pp. 333-4): "It is a remarkable coincidence that I should, years later, have discovered that another person, by whom I mean you, should have had the same sentiments regarding Brooklyn Bridge which inspired the main theme and pattern of my poem." Eventually, instead of Stella's painting, three fine photographs by Walker Evans graced the Paris edition.

⁸³Letters, p. 340.

⁸⁴Op. cit., p. 343.

⁸⁵Op. cit., p. 345.

⁸⁶Op. cit., p. 347.