SOURCE: "The Success of Failure: Hart Crane's Revisions of Whitman and Eliot in 'The Bridge '," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 54, No. 1, January, 1989, pp. 55-70.

[In the following essay, Schultz considers the use Crane made of the works T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman in writing The Bridge.]

Hart Crane composed The Bridge during the seven years between 1923 and 1930. His ambitions for the poem were enormous: it was to be nothing less than what he called, in letters to his patron otto Kahn, "a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America" (Letters 223) and "an epic of the modern consciousness" (308). The very scope of his ambition threatened the project with failure, and the last sections that Crane wrote, including "The Tunnel" (1926) and "Cape Hatteras" (1929), deal very directly with poetic ambition and failure.¹ In a 20 June 1926 letter to Waldo Frank, Crane expressed the fear that he was deluding himself in finding links between the past and the future. He directed his most damning criticism, however, at the symbol of the bridge itself: "The bridge as a symbol today has no significance beyond an economical approach to shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism and toothpicks" (261). Later in that letter he asserts bitterly, "A bridge will be written in some kind of style and form, at worst it will be something as good as advertising copy" (262). These harsh self-criticisms sound painfully like those that greeted The Bridge on its completion, charges by Crane's friends, Allen Tate and Yvor Winters among others, that the poem failed as an epic, that it was incoherent.² Yet there is a larger problem hidden behind these value judgments, for whether or not one considers The Bridge to be a failure, its main subject is failure.¹ The poem's major figures—Columbus (who failed to find the passage to India), Rip Van Winkle, the mother in "Indiana," the sailor in "Cutty Sark," and the women of the "Three Songs"—are all failures. Crane's obsession with failure, at the time of the letter to Frank, came in part out of his reading of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West.⁴More importantly, American cultural criticism of the time took America's failings as its principle subject. When Crane read Waldo Frank's Our America on its publication in 1919, he remarked both on the pessimism—and the truth—of Frank's analysis (Letters 26). And Frank's polemic was but one of many similar tracts, including the 1922 symposium, Civilization in the United States. Crane's poem, composed over seven years of the decade, in some ways shares the temper of the times. Yet what makes The Bridge so radical is its uncompromising refusal to hold to that temper.

"The Waste Land," published in 1922, elaborated a modernist poetics of failure. About Eliot, Crane felt persistently ambivalent: "There is no one writing in English who can command so much respect, to my mind, as Eliot," Crane wrote. "However, I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply justified, in his own case" (114). The Bridge is Crane's response to "The Waste Land"—he considered his poem to be "an affirmation of experience," in opposition to the "negative" posed by Eliot (351). Crane's poem also responds, by extension, to the poet himself, nursing doubts about his ability to justify the ecstatic praise of "Atlantis." (That section, written first, was meant all along to be placed last in The Bridge.) In positioning himself against Eliot, Crane joined the league of Walt Whitman, for whom he wrote "Cape Hatteras." But Crane recognized Whitman to be a complicated and complicating figure, and he was aware that Whitman's perception of American possibilities had altered over time; the Whitman of Democratic Vistas is far more pessimistic than the Whitman of "Song of Myself," as Crane acknowledged in a 1930 letter to Allen Tate (353-54). So Crane, in The Bridge, had not only to overturn Eliot's negations, but he had also to address himself to the Whitman who writes in Democratic Vistas that the United States could "prove the most tremendous failure of time" (930).

Crane's purpose in addressing Whitman in "Cape Hatteras" and in echoing and responding to "The Waste Land" in "The Tunnel," is twofold, for Whitman and Eliot conflate Crane's mythical and his poetic concerns. I argue in the first part of this essay that in "Cape Hatteras" Crane seeks (with difficulty) to reaffirm Whitman's vision of America. He does so dialectically, testing that vision against a grimmer contemporary reality and a grimmer poetics. Having reaffirmed the vision at the end of "Cape Hatteras," Crane tests it once again, and more severely, in the most Eliotic sections of The Bridge. "The Tunnel" is the last of a pessimistic series of poems (including the "Three Songs" and "Quaker Hill") that form a link between "Cape Hatteras" and "Atlantis." I argue in the second section of the essay that Crane finds an alternative to Eliot in Edgar Allan Poe.

To a certain extent Crane exalts failure, making it the subject of his myth. But for Crane, as for Waldo Frank in Our America, failure can be sacred if it denotes a failure of "material ends" (Frank 146). The myth that Crane tells involves literal quests for riches (from Columbus's to that of the mother in "Indiana"). The failure of that myth, and of Eliot's myth of negation, is necessary before the poet is able to revive America's spiritual possibilities, and the myth that Whitman created.

I

The connections between Whitman and Crane have often been noted but rarely discussed in detail. One important exception is Donald Pease's revision of Harold Bloom's theory of influence, which he applies to Crane's assimilations of Whitman. In The Anxiety of Influence Bloom argues a jealous relation between the younger and the older poet, the younger writing by aggressively misreading his predecessor. Pease, to the contrary, finds Crane's attitude toward Whitman to be less anxious. He locates a better parallel in Blake's use of Milton: in the epic, "Milton," the older poet enters Blake's foot. Pease emphasizes the kind of re-visionism that reaffirms: "Crane feels his freedom compromised by the very discourse intended to express it, and he attempts to write his way out of the modernist dilemma through a re-vision of the poetry of his British ancestor William Blake and his American predecessor Walt Whitman" (Pease 193). Pease's argument, which is in many ways a compelling one, looks past Crane's genuine criticism of Whitman toward the reaffirmations that conclude "Cape Hatteras." But Whitman's vision had failed. The ways in which Crane works through that failure, and toward a re-vision of Whitman, is the subject of my discussion of the poem: my conclusion resembles Pease's, but I see the process as more complicated, and Crane as more ambivalent, than he does.

Crane's attempt to write an American myth was complicated by America's history, which had left Whitman a lonely and ineffectual myth-maker. His reaffirmation of Whitman's faith required an overturning of history, or the "apocalyptical method," that Waldo Frank described in his 1929 book, The Re-discovery of America⁵: "The ideal forms we have inherited are finally dissolved; therefore the message of our fathers, based on those forms, must be transfigured by us, ere we can use it. To our tragic artists there remains only the apocalyptic method . . . this direct recreation of a formal world from the stuffs within us"(140).

The apocalyptic method provides a way to reconstruct history by overturning it, recreating Platonic forms from within, or lending a myth back to God, as in "To Brooklyn Bridge." To overturn history is, for Crane, also to overturn Whitman, for Whitman is at once a formidable historical figure and the author of a powerful interpretation of history, that is, "the message of our fathers." Crane's rewriting of Whitman in "Cape Hatteras" is a necessary prelude to Whitman's rebirth within Crane. The overturning, if you will, is Bloomian, the rebirth, Peasian.

In a 1926 letter to Waldo Frank, Crane presented Whitman as a solitary figure who had in many ways been proven wrong by history: "If only America were half as worthy today to be spoken of as Whitman spoke of it fifty years ago there might be something for me to say—not that Whitman received or required any tangible proof of his intimations, but that time has shown how increasingly lonely andineffectual his confidence stands" {Letters 261-62). This passage reveals at least as much about Crane's fear that his own confidence was ungrounded as it does about Whitman, for his criticism of Whitman is also a warning to himself: "Well, perhaps I need a little more skepticism to put me right on The Bridge again" (Letters 262). This skepticism acts as a kind of homeopathic cure: by looking critically at Whitman, Crane will free himself to write. Crane inscribes his demystification of Whitman into "Cape Hatteras," situating him as a lonely and ineffectual seer whose gleaming eyes foreshadow Edgar Allan Poe's "agate lanterns" in "The Tunnel":

O Saunterer on free ways still ahead!
Not this our empire yet, but labyrinth
Wherein your eyes, like the Great Navigator's
without ship,
Gleam from the great stones of each prison crypt
Of canyoned traffic . . .

We recall that Columbus—the Great Navigator—retained his belief that he had discovered Cathay in the face of evidence to the contrary. Tzvetan Todorov describes Columbus's strategy of interpretation as one that guarantees his failure to see through self-delusion.⁶ Columbus's failure to recognize that what he saw was other than what he believed found a parallel in Crane's fear that his poetic project was based on illusion. An earlier reference to the labyrinth helps to illuminate this point, as it concerns the poet's fear that he will not be able to see beyond himself:

What whisperings of far watches on the main
Relapsing into silence, while time clears

Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects
A periscope to glimpse what joys or pain
Our eyes can share or answer—then deflects
Us, shunting to a labyrinth submersed
Where each sees only his dim past reversed . ..

The poet's problem is like that of Columbus and Whitman: these seers are threatened by a solipsism that causes them to see only what they want to see. Seeing is necessarily artificial, governed by time, and only occasionally open to the counter-response of the outside world. Crane pursues his examination of sight in what follows, again linking Whitman to Columbus:

. . . Confronting the Exchange,
Surviving in a world of stocks,—they also range
Across the hills where second timber strays
Back over Connecticut farms, abandoned
pastures,—
Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth!

These "undenying" eyes, which are like Columbus's "sea eyes," look beyond, without taking into consideration the failed foreground. The eyes that are "bright with myth" are self-deluding; neither Columbus nor Whitman explains what is: failure cannot change their myths, because they cannot see it. In offering a corrective, Crane presents himself as a poet who can look failure in the eye and go beyond it.

Although Crane knew of Whitman's change of heart in Democratic Vistas, his portrait in "Cape Hatteras" is of the earlier, more optimistic bard. In preliminary sketches of The Bridge Crane intended to write a dialogue between Whitman and a dying soldier during the Civil War; he meant to follow that with an exploration of "the infraction of physical death, disunity, on the concept of immortality" (Letters 241). That sketch offers far less drama than does the final version of the poem, for it sets up a symmetry between Whitman's vision and national experience. In the "Cape Hatteras" that we read, Whitman's vision is less inclusive; he largely fails to see the disunity that surrounds him. Crane devotes only seven lines to Whitman's war experience and his "memories of vigils, bloody, by that Cape," then abruptly shifts to a lyrical passage concerning his own discovery of Whitman's poetry. Whitman is, instead, "Our Meistersinger," the originator of the myth that Crane purports to carry on. But as the master singer, the first author of "that great Bridge, our Myth," he is also a poet whose vision has failed in history.

Crane's critical voice in this section speaks loudest in his revision of the myth of flight, which relates to Crane's larger concern with Whitman. As L. S. Dembo and others have pointed out, Crane was influenced by Eugene Jolas's manifesto of Verticalism, a rewriting of the ancient myth of flight, which attributed divine qualities to the airplane.⁷ Crane takes the "marvellous of the skies" from the manifesto, but rewrites the myth of Icarus, including his fall—now a crash. The greatest fall surveyed by Crane, however, is that of modern science that was so beloved by Whitman. Ironically, Crane directs his critique of modernity at a poem written previously, that is, Whitman's "Years of the Modern." Crane boldly steals phrases from Whitman's poem and wrenches them out of context with the verve of Eliot raiding the word-hoard in "The Waste Land." "Years of the Modern" is indeed an optimistic catalogue ("Years of the modern! years of the unperform'd! / Your horizon rises, I see it parting away for more august dramas, . . .") that continues:

Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I
vainly try
to pierce it, is full of phantoms,
Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their
shapes
around me,
This incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic
fever of
dreams O years!
Your dreams O years, how they penetrate through
me! (I
know not whether I sleep or wake;)
The perform'd America and Europe grow dim,
retiring in
shadow behind me,
The unperform'd, more gigantic than ever,
advance, advance
upon me.

(598)

For Whitman the more august dramas are imminent, though as yet unperformed. Crane's use of Whitman's material, however, sheds a new light on the "years of the unperform'd,"—a period that extended from the inception of Whitman's vision to that of his own. This period, however, left "unperformed" Whitman's prophetic myth. Where Whitman typically discounts time (as he does most flagrantly in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"), Crane here insists on its passage. Crane's myth of flight, like Whitman's myth, cannot survive time's withering. Whitman himself flies metaphorically and timelessly in "Song of Myself," when he writes in section 49:

I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night,
I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday
sunbeams
reflected,
And debouch to the steady and central from the
offspring
great or small.

(246)

But he can only ascend in Crane after that poet has shown the failure of the myth of flight. The juxtaposition of sections of "Cape Hatteras" devoted to Whitman and those devoted to the plane crash strongly suggest that Crane is describing the failure of Whitman's myth in the destruction caused by World War I. This is also Whitman's crash, which is necessary so that Whitman can be reborn in Crane. But for Crane, this destruction—of the plane and of the myth of flight—is part of a redemptive process—"The benediction of the shell's deep, sure reprieve!"—because that destruction allows for rebirth, reascension. The immediate aftermath of the crash is indeed Whitman's ascension in Crane:

But who has held the heights more sure than thou,
O Walt!—Ascensions of thee hover in me now
As thou at junctions elegiac, there, of speed
With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed!

After the destructions wrought by history, Whitman's myth is reborn. The poem all along stutters with direct quotation, including, "Years of the Modern," "The Open Road," "Recorders Ages Hence," and many other direct and indirect allusions.⁸ But now Crane takes on Whitman's words as affirmations, looking past science toward a mathematics of the word ("New integers of Roman, Viking Celt") whose mathematician is Whitman. For Crane inheritance raises the problem of repetition and, more specifically, the danger that he, the poet, will fall into his inheritance, the voice of another poet. In "Cape Hatteras" Crane positively courts this danger, asserting his community of vision with Whitman by way of inventive plagiarism: he writes long lines suggestive of the older poet. But the effect of the quotations, even where he most affirms his connection to Whitman (as in the quotation above), is quite opposite to that of his predecessor, for Crane uses Whitman's words in a new context, and uses rhyme ("like Alexander Pope in a mild frenzy'⁹). The repeated words and phrases affirm identity: they work oddly with Crane's claim that he is one with Whitman and that their visions are inseparable. Yet the rhyming works against Crane's claim. He repeats, while asserting his originality, just as he pays homage in a later poem to Emily Dickinson without imitating her style. And Crane's use of enjambment allows for a reading of the following lines as a recollection of his own ascension into poetic power, as though to read Whitman were to become identical with him:

As vibrantly I following down Sequoia alleys
Heard thunder's eloquence through green arcades
Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass
tuft—'til
Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling
hill!

Both the "I" and the "trumpets" share the verb "set," so that Crane shares the thunder's trumpeting—that of nature and of Whitman.

If the initial movement in the poem is of a poet who depends on Whitman even as he gains power by way of the elder poet, then its final movement makes Whitman dependent on Crane: his ascent is predicated upon Crane's power to record it. True, the end of the poem affirms Whitman's vision, but it also lays Crane's claim that Whitman is afoot again precisely because Crane has him by the hand:

yes, Walt,
Afoot again, and onward without halt,—
Not soon, nor suddenly,—no, never to let go
My hand
in yours,
Walt Whitman—
so—

These lines establish sublime counterparts to those that end "Van Winkle," where the poet gains authority over his myth, guiding Rip into the subway. They indicate the poet's self-confidence not so much by virtue of his belonging in Whitman's company, but Whitman's belonging in his. Whitman's "Passage to India" is the source of Crane's epigraph to "Cape Halteras": "The seas all crossed, / westered the capes, the voyage done. . . . "¹⁰It is concerned with the poet's relation to another creator, in Whitman's case God. In the eighth section of Whitman's poem—"Cape Hatteras" is the eighth section of The Bridge, excluding the "Proem"—Whitman bids his soul take ship, "launch out on trackless seas," and mount toward God, who is referred to parenthetically as "the Comrade perfect." If God is the perfect creator, Whitman is more perfect:

Thou pulse—thou motive of the stars, suns,
systems,
That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious,
Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,
How should I think, how breathe a single breath,
how
speak, if, out of myself,
I could not launch, to those, superior universes?

(538)

Whitman's mastering soul journeys until it greets God as a brother. The following lines include those that Crane uses as his headnote:

Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time
achiev'd,
The seas all cross'd, weather'd the cape, the
voyage done,
Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the
aim attain'd
As fill'd with friendship, love complete, the Elder
Brother
found,
The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

Just as Whitman's voyage ends with God, so his voyage may be said to end with Crane in "Cape Hatteras." Whitman's voyage has been accomplished and, at the same time, begun anew in Crane's poem: "recorders ages hence" will confront not only Whitman, but a Crane who has been strengthened by his encounter with him. The elder brother it is, who finds the younger one. "Recorders" may in fact read Whitman through Crane's lens. The bridge between them, like Crane's other bridges, asserts independence and difference even as it asserts identity; it is like the image of a vase whose two sides are human profiles—we see now the one, now the other, but we know that they originate from the same object. Whitman's "Recorders Ages Hence" also ends with an image of a bridge, the spanning of two friends' shoulders by their outstretched arms:

Whose happiest days were far away through
fields, in woods,

on hills, he and another wandering hand in
hand, they
twain apart from other men,
Who oft as he saunter'd the streets curv'd with his
arm the shoulder of his friend, while the arm of his
friend rested
upon him also.

(276).

The strength of "Cape Harteras" lies in Crane's translation of Whitman into the modern idiom: he reads Whitman's optimism through the pessimistic tonalities of Democratic Vistas and, as we shall see, those of T. S. Eliot. By including the airplane's flight and fall, Crane reworks Whitman's myth to include failure. But in so doing he also clears the ground for rebirth, and re-claims possibility out of the unperformed visions of the past and the present. Crane's reading of Whitman is a loving one, but it is also in some sense an Eliotic one, setting Whitman's vision against that of the "Waste Land" of World War I.

II

Crane's discomfort with Whitman, as we have seen, was due to the insufficient strength of his myth in the face of history; his discomfort with T. S. Eliot was due to that poet's negative vision. If Crane felt the need to reconcile Whitman's optimism with the fact of failure, he also felt compelled to use Eliot as the representative of modern failure and to go beyond him, to "launch into praise," as he told Tate (Letters 94). If Walt ascends in Crane's "Cape Halteras," then in "The Tunnel" Crane ascends in Eliot, showing a way through what he termed Eliot's "absolute impasse" (Letters 90). Crane's imitation of Eliot's language and style is in some sense a sincere form of flattery, for Crane genuinely admired Eliot's skill. But more importantly, Crane uses Eliot as a negative example: he states ironically, in a letter quoted previously, that pessimism is justified in Eliot's case, but not in his own. Whereas Eliot has succeeded brilliantly in portraying failure, Crane asserts that he will risk failing in order to point the way past "The Waste Land." Crane was not alone in his emotional reaction against Eliot's poem; William Carlos Williams was also among those who felt betrayed by the poem. He compared its impact to that of "an atom bomb" (Autobiography 174). Williams—and Crane—countered Eliot's example by asserting the primacy of American literature, whose founding father they considered to be Edgar Allan Poe. "The Waste Land" struck them as a poem more British than American. Poe, unlike Eliot, had had a failed career, but he had introduced what Waldo Frank called "the apocalyptic method" to literature. As Williams writes in In the American Grain, he "[drove] to destroy, to annihilate the copied, the slavish, the FALSE literature around him" (223). Poe serves both Williams and Crane as the model of an original poet who is not afraid to write against the kind of poetry that seems to him "untrue." Williams's choice of Poe as the American original seems surprising, as does Crane's acceptance of that choice: surely both derive more from Whitman than from Poe." But their choiceis, in a curious way, quite apt; if Poe's influence was nothing if indirect on his American followers, he did exert a significant influence on European writers. Those writers, in their turn, influenced T. S. Eliot. In the context of "The Tunnel," therefore, Poe is at once identified with Eliot—in his role as Daemon and failed truth-teller—and with an alternative to Eliot. Certainly in what Williams called Poe's "anger to sweep out the unoriginal .. . to destroy, to annihilate the copied," we may be tempted to see an antidote to Eliot's quotations of a tradition less American than European.

The voice of Eliot describes Hell in The Bridge. It speaks loudest when Crane guides us into the tunnel that owes both its sound and its subject to "The Waste Land." Crane does not address Eliot as directly as he addresses Whitman; there is no ascent of Eliot in Crane, although his presence in the poem is inescapable. Sherman Paul notes the Eliotic tenor of "The Tunnel," and its resemblances to the Faustus and Helen poem.¹² An astonishing number of details in Crane's poem refer to Eliot: the poet's punning hesitancy ("You shall search them all. / Someday by heart you'll learn each famous sight"; "Or can't you quite make up your mind to ride"); and his odd anatomical descriptions ("This answer lives like verdigris, like hair / Beyond extinction, surcease of the bone"). Toward the end of the poem, the poet addresses the Daemon as one who "spoon[s] us out more liquid than the dim / Locution of the eldest star,"—an echo of Prufrock's coffee spoons that measure out our lives. The dialogue, as Sherman Paul points out, is derived from the pub scene in "The Waste Land," and its unhappy sexuality. Paul compares the poet's voice to that of Prufrock talking to himself, including a reference to himself as Lazarus, but he does not develop Crane's obvious relationship to Eliot. The Eliotic tone of this poem is appropriate, because this section is the poem's nadir; the necessary Inferno to precede the Paradise that is portrayed in "Atlantis."

Crane described "The Tunnel" section of The Bridge in a letter of August, 1923 to Waldo Frank as something of a catharsis: "It's rather ghastly, almost surgery—and, oddly almost all from the notes and stitches I have written while swinging on the strap at late midnights going home" (Letters 274-75). The words of the poem seem at once part of his flesh (the pun on "stitches") and taken out of his body ("surgery"): the implications are not of healing, but as "ghastly" as the discovery of Poe "swinging on the strap" in "The Tunnel." Crane's pain at severing himself from Eliot is understandable, in view of the fact that he had advised Tate to "[absorb] him enough [that] we can trust ourselves as never before, in the air or on the sea" (Letters 90).

Poe's failure to be appreciated in his lifetime probably spoke to Crane's own fears about the lack of readers. Like Eliot, Poe is a negative bridge, as evidenced in one stanza from Poe's poem "To One in Paradise," that Williams, incidentally, thought to be his best work:

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
"On, on!"—but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!

(31)

This passage is starkly reminiscent of Crane's doubt, referred to earlier, that he could find legitimate links between the past and the future. The contrast to Whitman's brotherly spanning of time and space is considerable. In "The Tunnel," the death that looks down looks through Poe's ghostly image and toward the poet:

—And did their riding eyes right through your
side,
And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?
And Death, aloft,—gigantically down
Probing through you—toward me, O evermore!

Crane's question for Poe reflects his fear that Poe, like Faustus, was not averse to selling his soul:

And when they dragged your retching flesh,
Your trembling hands that night through
Baltimore—
That last night on the ballot rounds, did you
Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?

The question is based on a story that Poe, on the night of his death, had been paid to vote fraudulently; if he had done so, his act would have represented a negation of the American myth, and of the myth of the artist as truth-teller. But Poe appears in Crane's poem, not only because of his failures, or his blindness, but because he founded a national literature.¹³ Poe thus becomes an ambivalent figure, at once failing and affirming, helping to bridge the gap between what America is and what it might be.

Poe remains in the underworld of the tunnel; the vehicle of birth is Lazarus, a figure derived both from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the Bible. The poet's identification with Prufrock is not accidental; to one of Prufrock's many questions—"And would it have been worth it, after all, / . . . / To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'—" he replies, like a daring Prufrock:

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

This Lazarus is the envoy of the poem's final word; he brings the word from below, as the poet has promised to "lend a myth to God" and reverse the traditional route of the word.

"The Tunnel" concludes with "hands [that] drop memory," and with memory comes the loss of all in the poem that is Eliot or Whitman. There is a new world—national and poetic—to be discovered in the poem's final section, "Atlantis." "Atlantis," despite its strainings after sublimity, contains no echoes of either poet; its voice and praise are those of Hart Crane. Its conclusion—"Is it Cathay[?] . . . / Whispers antiphonal in azure swing"—seems oddly hesitant. Taken, however, as the poet's final act of revision, the last lines make brilliant sense, swinging between the sheer transcendence of Whitman's vision and the depressing gravity of the Eliotic conversations in "The Tunnel."

Hart Crane builds a bridge between himself, Whitman, and Eliot; he is finally able to speak his own vision only because he has answered to theirs.¹⁴ His myth of America is powerful, not only for what it says about the nation, but also for what it says about America's poets. He is not afraid to face national and poetic failures and to show them not as an end, but rather as a means toward a more positive beginning. Crane's lesson, that the poet must risk failure, perhaps fail, in order to show us how to praise, is an important one. He perhaps feared that he might embody what Joseph Riddel (writing on "The Broken Tower") calls "the pathetic gesture of a man dying into his work" (91); but the sublimity of failure assured him of a certain heroism.

NOTES

¹ See Edward Brunner on the textual history of The Bridge. Brunner sees no conflict between Crane and Whitman and claims that they possessed "identical values." I see Crane's attitude toward Whitman as more ambivalent and interesting: thus I also consider "Cape Hatteras" to be more important to The Bridge than Brunner does.

² Early critics of Crane's work (Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, R. P. Blackmur) concentrated on the poet's failure, however splendid (they never question his great talent). Only in the 1960s did critics begin to assume Crane's excellence and control of his vision. The affirmative critics include L. S. Dembo (SanskritCharge), R. W. B. Lewis, Sherman Paul, M. D. Uroff, and Robert Combs.

³ Joseph Riddel emphasizes the self-sacrificial quality of Crane's work, and the inevitable failure of any attempt "to purify himself virtually into the form of a poem" (92). Riddel addresses himself more to the failure of the man than of the poetry itself. My argument limits itself to the poetry.

⁴ Crane mentioned Spengler often in the letters he wrote while he was at work on The Bridge. In 1931, after he had finished the poem, he wrote Waldo Frank: "Present day America seems a long way off from the destiny I fancied when I wrote that poem. In some ways Spengler must have been right" (Letters 366).

⁵ Waldo Frank was not alone in his interest in apocalypse. D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats wrote, respeclively, a book (Apocalypse, published in 1931) and several late poems, including "Byzantium" (1932) and "Lapis Lazuli" (1938), on the subject.

⁶ See Todorov 14-33. Robert Combs, who argues that Crane uses romantic irony, writes: "Columbus had not, as he thought, found Cathay. He says that being proved right nearly drove him mad with joy, but we know that he was not right. So we see the sense of value again as glorious and ridiculous" (116). I agree, although I think we see Columbus as misguided, rather than "ridiculous."

⁷ See L. S. Dembo, "Hart Crane's "Verticalist' Poem." Uroff discusses the theme of flight (114-52), but she assumes Crane's unambivalent stance toward Whitman. Tom Chaffin makes the same attempt with his more recent interpretation of Crane's technological sublime.

⁸ R. W. B. Lewis enumerates Crane's debts to Whitman in "Cape Hatteras" (328). On Whitman and Crane see also Bernice Slote's chapter in Start with the Sun (137-65).

⁹ The phrase is R. W. B. Lewis's (328).

¹⁰ Crane was also capable of spoofing the poem, as he does in "America's Plutonic Ecstasies," a Cummingsesque poem about laxatives.

¹¹ William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain, although it is a prose work, is similar to The Bridge in its concentration on American failures, and in its glorification of them. Crane's claim to have read the book after he had completed The Bridge is probably disingenuous: "I put off reading it, you know," he wrote Waldo Frank in 1926, "until I felt my own way cleared beyond chance of confusions incident to reading a book so intimate to my theme. I was so interested to note that he puts Poe and his "character' in the same position I had symbolized for him in 'The Tunnel'(Letters 277-78). Actually, Crane most likely read excerpts from the book as they were published in journals. Joseph E. Slate notes that one chapter of In the American Grain appeared in the January, 1923 Broom alongside Crane's "The Springs of Guilty Song" (490). John Unterecker, who also believes that Williams influenced Crane, reported that Crane had invited Williams and his wife to the party he threw for Harry Crosby, "because Crane had [I suspect] used a passage from In the American Grain to link "Ave Maria' and the opening sections of "Powhatan's Daughter' (608-09).

¹² Sherman Paul briefly discusses Crane's debt to Eliot in "The Tunnel" (265). See also Herbert Leibowitz (123 ff). John Irwin argues: "Setting out to confute Eliot's pessimistic rule, Crane found himself in danger of becoming an example of that rule" (184).

¹³ Crane borrows from two sources in his lines about Poe. "—And did their riding eyes right through your side, / And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?" echoes the lines with which Blake begins his poem on Milton: "And did those feet in ancient time, / Walk upon Englands mountains green" (95). The lines that follow, "And Death, aloft,—gigantically down / Probing through you—toward me, O evermore!" (the last word is an echo of "nevermore") are derived from Poe and were transmitted through Williams's In the American Grain (see page 231).

¹⁴ Whitman and Eliot are not, after all, without their affinities. Prufrock's invitation, "Let us go then, you and I," parodies Whitman's self-assured, "And what I assume you shall assume." "The Waste Land" is itself a dry variant of Whitman's "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life": "I too am but a trail of drift and debris, / I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island." Whitman continues, "Tufts of straw, sands, fragments, / Buoy'd hither from many moods, one contradicting another . . ." (395-96).

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