[In the following essay, Frank discusses the ways in which Crane represents the quintessential poet of modern America.]

A

Agrarian America had a common culture, which was both the fruit and the carrier of what I have called elsewhere "the great tradition" [The Re-discovery of America]. This tradition rose in the Mediterranean world with the will of Egypt, Israel and Greece, to recreate the individual and the group in the image of values called divine. The same will established Catholic Europe, and when it failed (producing nonetheless what came to be the national European cultures), the great tradition survived. It survived in the Europe of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. With the Puritans, it was formally transplanted to the North American seaboard. Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards; later, in a more narrow sense, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, carried on the great tradition, with the same tools, on the same intellectual and economic terms, that had been brought from Europe and that had failed in Europe. It was transplanted, it was not transfigured. But before the final defeat of its Puritan avatar—a defeat ensured by the disappearance of our agrarian economy, the great tradition had borne fruit in two general forms. The first was the ideological art of what Lewis Mumford calls the Golden Day: a prophetic art of poets so diverse as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, whose vision was one of Possibility and whose doom, since its premise was a disappearing world, was to remain suspended in the thin air of aspiration. The second was within the lives of the common people. Acceptance of the ideal of the great tradition had its effect upon their character; and this humbler achievement is recorded, perhaps finally, in the poems of Robert Frost. Frost's art, unlike Whitman's or Melville's, is one of Probability. It gives us not a vision, but persons. They are frustrated, poor, often mad. They face grimly their resurgent hills, knowing the failure of their lives to enact the beauty of their great tradition. Yet their dwelling within it for many generations, their acceptance of its will for their own, has given them even in defeat a fibre of strength, a smoldering spark of victory; and it is this in the verse of Frost that makes it poetry of a high order.

Frost's record (North of Boston, 1914; Mountain Interval, 1916) was already madewhen the United States entered the War; and the War brought final ruin to the American culture of "free" individuals living for the most part on farms, whose beauty Frost recorded. The tradition which had tempered the persons in Frost's poems had already, before the Civil War, sung its last high Word in the old terms that were valid from Plato to Fichte. And this too was fitting, for the Civil War prepared the doom which the World War completed, of our agrarian class-culture. But the great tradition, unbroken from Hermes Trismegistus and Moses, does not die. In a society transfigured by new scientific and economic forces, it too must be transfigured. The literature and philosophy of the past hundred years reveal many efforts at this transfiguration: in this common purpose, Marx and Nietzsche are brothers. The poetry of Whitman was still founded on the substances of the old order. The poetry of Hart Crane is a deliberate continuance of the great tradition in terms of our industrialized world.

If we bear in mind this purpose of Crane's work, we shall be better prepared to understand his methods, his content, his obscurity. We shall, of course, not seek the clear forms of a poet of Probability, like Frost. But we shall, also, not too widely trust Crane's kinship with the poets of the Emersonian era, whose tradition he immediately continues. They were all, like Crane, bards of Possibility rather than scribes of realisation. Yet they relied upon inherited forms . . . forms emotional, ethical, social, intellectual and religious, transplanted from Europe and not too deliquescent for their uses. Whitman's apocalypse rested on the politics of Jefferson and on the economics of the physiocrats of France. Emerson was content with the ideology of Plato and Buddha, his own class world not too radically differing from theirs. Even Emily Dickinson based her explosive doubts upon the permanent premise of a sheltered private garden, to which such as she could always meditatively retire. These conventional assumptions gave to these poets an accessible and communicable form; for we too have been nurtured on the words of that old order. But in Crane, none of the ideal landmarks, none of the formal securities, survive; therefore his language problem—the poet's need to find words at once to create and to communicate his vision—is acute. Crane, who began to write while Frost was perfecting his story, lived, instinctively at first, then with poignant awareness, in a world whose cant outlines of person, class, creed, value—still clear, however weak, in Emerson's Boston, Whitman's New York, Poe's Richmond—had dissolved. His vision was the timeless One of all the seers, and it binds him to the great tradition; but because of the time that fleshed him and that he needed, to substance his vision, he could not employ traditional concretions. He began, naked and brave, in a cultural chaos; and his attempt, with sound materials, to achieve poetic form, was ever close to chaos. What is clear in Crane, besides the intensity and the traditionalism of his creative will, is the impact of inchoate forces through which he rose to utterance. Cities, machines, the warring hungers of lonely and herded men, the passions released from defeated loyalties, were ever near to overwhelm the poet. To master them, he must form his Word unaided. In his lack of valid terms to express his relationship with life, Crane was a true culture-child; more completely than either Emily Dickinson or Blake, he was a child of modern man.

B

Harold Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, July 21, 1899. His parents, Clarence Arthur Crane and Grace Hart, were of the pioneer stock that trekked in covered wagons from New England to the Western Reserve. But his grandparents, on both sides, had already shifted from the farm to small town business; and Clarence A. Crane became a wealthy candy manufacturer in Cleveland. Here, the poet, an only child, lived from his tenth year. At thirteen, he was composing verse; at sixteen, in the words of Gorham Munson, [in Destinstions] "he was writing on a level that Amy Lowell never rose from." In the winter of 1916, he went with his mother, who soon separated from her husband, to the Isle of Pines, south of Cuba, where his grandfather Hart had a fruit ranch; and this journey, which gave him his first experience of the sea, was cardinal in his growth. The following year, he was in New York; in contact with Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of The Little Review; tutoring for college; writing; already passionately and rather wildly living. At this time, two almost mutually exclusive tendencies divided the American literary scene. One was centered byEzra Pound, Alfred Kreymborg, the imagists, Harriet Monroe's Poetry and The Little Review; the other was grouped about The Seven Arts. Young Crane was in vital touch with both. He was reading Marlowe, Donne, Rimbaud, Laforgue; but he was also finding inspiration in Whitman, Sherwood Anderson and Melville. His action, when the United States lurched into war, reveals the complexity of his interests. He decided not to go to college, and by his own choice, returned to Cleveland, to work as a common laborer in a munition plant and a shipyard on the Lake. He loved machines, the earth-tang of the workers. He was no poet in an ivory tower. But he also loved music; he wanted time to write, to meditate, to read. The conflict of desires led him, perhaps, to accept what seemed a comfortable compromise; a job in the candy business of his father where he hoped to find some leisure without losing contact with the industrial world.

The elder Crane seems to have been a man of turbulent and twisted power, tough-fibred and wholly loyal to the gods of Commerce. He was sincerely outraged by the jest of fortune which had given him a poet for a son. Doubtless, he was bitter at his one child's siding with the mother in the family conflict; but under all, there was a secret emotional bond between the two, making for the ricochet of antagonism and attraction that lasted between them until the father's death, a year before the poet's. The candy magnate set to work to drive the "poetry nonsense" out of his boy. Hart became a candy salesman behind a counter, a soda-jerker, a shipping clerk. He received a minimum wage. Trusted employees were detailed to spy on him lest he read "poetry books" during work hours. Hart Crane escaped several times from the paternal yoke, usually to advertising jobs near home or in New York. And at last, in 1920, he decided to break with both Cleveland and his father.

His exquisite balance of nerves was already permanently impaired. The youthful poet, who had left a comfortable household to live with machines and rough men, who had shouldered "the curse of sundered parentage," [The Bridge] who had tasted the strong drink of literature and war, carried within him a burden intricate and heavy, a burden hard to hold in equilibrium. Doubtless, the chaos of his personal life led him to rationalise that accessible tangent ease from the strain of balance, which excess use of alcohol invited. Yet there was a deeper cause for the dis-equilibrium which, when Crane was thirty-two, was finally to break him from his love of life and destroy him.

Crane was a mystic. The mystic is a man who knows, by immediate experience, the organic continuity between his self and the cosmos. This experience, which is the normal fruit of sensitivity, becomes intense in a man whose native energy is great; and lest it turn into an overwhelming, shattering burden, it must be ruthlessly disciplined and ordered. The easiest defense from this mystic burden is of course the common one of denying the mystic experience altogether. An anti-mystical age like ours is simply one so innerly resourceless that it solves, by negation and aggressive repression, the problem of organic continuity between the self and a seemingly chaotic world—thus perpetuating the inward-and-outward chaos. The true solution is too arduous for most men: by self-knowledge and self-discipline, it is to achieve within one's self a stable nucleus to bear and finally transfigure the world's impinging chaos. For the nucleus within the self, as it is gradually revealed, is impersonal and cosmic; is indeed the dynamic key to order in the "outward" world. By this synthesis of his own burden, the mystic escapes from destruction and becomes a master. Crane did not personally achieve it. Yet he was too virile to deny the experience of continuity; he let the world pour in; and since his nuclear self was not disciplined to detachment from his nerves and passions, he lived exacerbated in a constant swing between ecstasy and exhaustion. Therefore, he needed the tangent release of excess drink and sexual indulgence.

The poet was clearer and shrewder than the man. His mind, grown strong, sought a poetic principle to integrate the exuberant flood of his impressions. The important poems, anterior to The Bridge, and written between his nineteenth and his twenty-fifth year, reveal this quest but not the finding. As Allen Tate points out in his Introduction to White Buildings (1926), "a suitable theme" is lacking. The themes of these poems are high enough. But, to quote Mr. Tate again: "A series of Imagist poems is a series of worlds. The poems of Hart Crane arefacets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination, a single evaluating power, which is at once the motive of the poetry and the form of its realisation." This central imagination, wanting the unitary principle or theme, wavers and breaks; turns back upon itself instead of mastering the envisaged substance of the poem. That is why, in this first group, a fragmentary part of a poem is sometimes greater than the whole. And that is why it is at times impossible to transpose a series of images into the sense- and thought-sequence that originally moved the poet and that must be perceived in order to move the reader. The mediate principle, conterminous with both the absolute image-logic of the poem and the thought-logic of the poet, and illumining the latter in the former, is imperfect. The first lines of his White Buildings

As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by .. .

are a superb expression of chaos, and of the poet's need to integrate this chaos within the active mirror of self. Page after page, "realities plunge by," only ephemerally framed in a mirroring mood which alas! at once melts, itself, into the turbulent procession. Objective reality exists in these poems only as an oblique moving-inward to the poet's mood. But the mood is never, as in imagist or romantic verse, given for and as itself. It is given only as a moving-outward toward the objective world. Each lyric is a diapason between two integers of a continuous one. But the integers (subjective and objective) are almost never clear; the sole clarity is the balance of antithetical movements. This makes of the poem an abstract, wavering, æsthetic body. There is not yet, as in the later work, a conscious, substantiated theme or principle of vision to stratify the interacting parts of the poem into an immobile whole. But in the final six lyrics "Voyages") there is the beginning of a synthesis attained by the symbolic use of the Sea. The turbulent experiences of Crane's childhood and youth are merged into a litany of the Sea.

You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the rapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
  All but the pieties of lovers' bands.

Here is the Sea, objective, huge, hostile, encompassing, maternal.

—As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
One frozen, trackless smile... What words
  Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we
  Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
  Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
  Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
And changed. . . .

And

. . . Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,—

here, as William Carlos Williams has noted, is the Sea giving to the poet'slove its rhythm and very substance.

Crane is using the symbol of the Sea as a principle of unity and release from the contradictions of personal existence; much as D. H. Lawrence used the symbol of perfect sexual union. Both, as poetic instruments for solving the mystic's burden, are romantic and unreal; both denote a return to a "beginning" before the life of reason, and a unity won by the refusal of human consciousness. Lawrence was satisfied with his symbol. Not Crane. His intellect was more robust, his art more rigorous. Crane knew the Sea—source of life, first Mother—as death to man; and that to woo it was death. White Buildings closes on the note of surrender. But the poet is ready to begin his quest again for a theme that shall integrate, not destroy, the multiple human world he loves.

In 1924, the poems of White Buildings written but unpublished, Crane was living at 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, in range of the Harbor, the Bridge, the seasounds:

Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails, Far strum of fog horns... .

And now the integrating theme came to him. By the fall of 1925, he had achieved the pattern of his Poem. He was working as a writer of advertising copy. He appealed successfully to Otto H. Kahn (his father, after he left Cleveland, gave him no financial assistance until the last years when his son's fame began to impress him); and with a generous purse he went to the Isle of Pines; then to Paris, Marseilles, writing and—at intervals—rather riotously living. The Poem was completed in December, 1929. In the interim, Crane had learned that the house where the vision of The Bridge first came to him and where he finished it, was once the property of Washington Roebling, and that the very room in which Crane lived had been employed by the paralysed engineer of Brooklyn Bridge as an observation tower to watch its construction. In the year when Crane first found his theme, Lewis Mumford was prophetically writing:

. . . beyond any other aspect of New York, I think, the Brooklyn Bridge has been a source of joy and inspiration to the artist. .. . All that the age had just cause for pride in—its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible—came to head in the Brooklyn Bridge. [Sticks and Stones]

The Bridge was published in April, 1930 (a limited first edition, inscribed to Otto H. Kahn, was issued earlier in Paris by the Black Sun Press). In 1931, Crane received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and went to Mexico; his plan being to write a poem on the history of Montezuma, a variation on the American theme which The Bridge stated.

The principle that Hart Crane had sought, to make him master of his sense of immediate continuity with a world overwhelmingly chaotic, gave him The Bridge. But in actual life, it did not sustain him. He had a literary method to apply the principle to his vision; he had no psychological method to apply it to his person. The symbol of the Sea—theme of retreat into the unity of immersion and of dissolution—still bespoke him, as it had finally bespoken the love experience in White Buildings. The Bridge, with its challenging synthesis of life, wherein all the modern multiverse is accepted and transfigured without loss into One, could not hold its poet. The poems later than The Bridge, despite their technical perfection, mark a retreat from the high position of that Poem back to the mood of White Buildings—a return from grappling with the elements of the industrial world back to the primal Mother world whose symbol is the tropic Sea.

It was not accidental that Crane's tender friendships were with boys who followed the Sea. And drink was the Sea's coadjutor; for it gave Crane release not, as with most men, from the burden of separateness from life, but from the more intolerable burden of continuity with life's chaos. The Sea had ebbed, while he stood high above it on his mythic Bridge; now again it was rising.

Here waves climb into dusk on gleaming mail;
Invisible valves of the sea—locks, tendons
Crested and creeping, troughing corridors . ..

Nor was it accidental that Crane now chose to go to Mexico, where for a thousand years a cult of Death—personal immolation in a Nature ruthless and terrible as the Sea—has been practiced by a folk of genius.

While Crane sailed to Mexico, I was writing:

Perhaps the earth of Mexico conspired to create the tragic mood of the Aztec, and to fulfill it in the Conquest from which modern Mexico was born. It is an earth unwieldy to man's pleasure. Titanic and volcanic mountains, mesetas of thin air, exuberant valleys, burning deserts, encourage a culture not smiling but extreme, from tears to frenzied laughter. This earth is a tyrant; it exiles valley from valley, it begrudges loam for corn or overwhelms it with torrential rains. Man is a stranger within it, and yet he loves it like a goddess, radiant, cruel, suddenly indulgent, in whose house he must serve forever. It is no mystery that in such an earth man should have built temples of blood or possessed his life in contemplation of a loveliness deadly as fire and distant as the stars.

But this man was still man. In a hostile and adorable world, man's and woman's love of life breathed on. . . . [America Hispana]

The second paragraph refers to the Mexico of Revolution—"the will of Mexico to be free of its death and of a beauty that flowers in death"; the first describes the Mexico that now possessed Hart Crane. The periodicity of his excesses grew swifter; the crystal intervening times when he could write were crowded out. Crane fought death in Mexico. But on his return to New York, to the modern chaos, there was the Sea: and he could not resist it.

On April 27, 1932, a few moments before noon, he walked to the stern of the Orizaba. The boat was about three hundred miles north of Havana, leaving the warm waters which fifteen years before he had first known. He took off his coat, quietly, and leaped.

C

The beauty of most of Crane's lyrics and of many passages in The Bridge seems to me to be inviolable. If I begin to analyse this conviction, I am brought first to the poetic texture. Its traditional base is complex. Here is a music plainly related to the Elizabethans. And here, also, is a sturdy lilt, like the march of those equal children of the Elizabethans—the pioneers. Although Crane describes a modern cabaret,

Brazen hypnotics glitter here;Glee shifts from foot to foot.. .

always, there is this homely metronomic, linking him to his fathers. Hence the organic soundness of the verse. Its livingness it owes to the dimension of variant emergence from the traditional music—like the emergence of our industrial world from the base of old America. Indeed, the entire intellectual and spiritual content of Crane's verse, and of Crane the child of modern man, could be derived from a study of his typical texture. And this is earnest of his importance.

But an analysis of Crane's poetics does not belong in a brief introduction. More fitting, perhaps, will be a swift outline of the action of The Bridge, if it help the reader to give his whole attention at once to that Poem's inner substance.

The will of Crane in The Bridge becomes deliberately myth-making. But this will, as we have seen, is born of a desperate, personal need: the poet must create order from the chaos with which his associative genius overwhelms him. The Poem retains the personal origin of its own will. The revelation of The Bridge, as myth and principle, comes to a person in the course of his day's business; and that person is the poet. In this sense, The Bridge is allied to the Commedia ofDante who also, in response to desperate need, takes a journey in the course of which his need finds consummation.

Lest the analogy be misleading, I immediately amend it. Dante's cosmos, imaged in an age of cultural maturity, when the life of man was coterminous with his vision, contains Time and persons: only in the ecstatic last scenes of the Paradiso are they momently merged and lost. Therefore, the line of Dante's Poem is always clear, being forth and back in Time: and the focus of the action is always cogent, being the person of the Poet with whom the reader can readily graph points of reference. Crane's cosmos (for reasons which we examined when we called Crane a child of modern man, a poet innocent of culturewords) has no Time: and his person-sense is vacillant and evanescent. Crane's journey is that of an individual unsure of his own form and lost to Time. This difference at once clarifies the disadvantageous æsthetic of The Bridge, as compared with that of broadly analogous Poems of cosmic search, like the Commedia or Don Quixote. It exemplifies the rôle played by the cultural epoch in the creation of even the most personal work of genius.

In "Proem," the poet exhorts the object of his choice—the Bridge. It shall synthesise the world of chaos. It joins city, river, and sea; man made it with his new Hand, the machine. And parabolawise, it shall now vault the continent and, transmuted, reach that inward heaven which is the fulfillment of man's need of order. Part One, "Ave Maria," is the vision of Columbus, mystic navigator who mapped his voyage in Isaiah, seeking to weld the world's riven halves into one. But this Columbus is scarcely a person; he is suffused in his history and his ocean; his will is more substantial than his eye. Nor does he live in Time. Part Two, "Powhatan's Daughter" (the Indian Princess is the flesh of America, the American earth, and mother of our dream), begins the recital of the poet's journey which in turn traces in extension (as Columbus in essence) the myth's trajectory. The poet awakes in his room above the Harbor, beside his lover. Risen (taking the harbor and the sea-sounds with him), he walks through the lowly Brooklyn streets: but walks with his cultural past: Pizzaro, Cortés, Priscilla, and now Rip Van Winkle whose eyes, fresh from sleep, will abide the poet's as they approach the transfigured world of today. He descends the subway that tunnels the East River (the Bridge is above); and now the subway is a river "leaping" from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate. A river of steel rails at first, bearing westward America's urban civilisation ("Stick your patent name on a signboard") and waking as it runs the burdened trudge of pioneers and all their worlds of factory and song. The patterning march of the American settlers traces the body, gradually, of Pocahontas; the flow of continent and man becomes the Great River; the huge travail of continental life, after the white man and before him, is borne southward, "meeting the Gulf." Powhatan's daughter, America's flesh, dances and the flesh becomes spirit. Dances the poet's boyhood memories of star and lake, of "sleek boat nibbling margin grass"; dances at last into the life of an Indiana mother, home from a frustrate trek to California for gold, who is bidding her son farewell; he is going east again to follow the sea. ("Write me from Rio.")

There are no persons in the universe, barely emergent from chaos, of Hart Crane; and this first crystallisation—the prairie mother—is the first weak block in the Poem's structure. Now with Part Three, "Cutty Sark," the physical course of the poet (the subway ride has exploded into the cosmic implications of the River) returns to view, but blurred. The poet is in South Street, Manhattan, near midnight: he is carousing with a sailor who brings him, in snatches of song, Leviathan, Plato, Stamboul—and the dim harbinger of Atlantis. "I started walking home across the Bridge"; and there, in the hallucinatory parade of clippers who once winked round the Horn "bright skysails ticketing the Line," the poet is out again, now seaward.

Part Four, "Cape Harteras," is the turning point of the Poem. Thus far, we have seen the individual forms of the poet's crowded day melt into widening, deepening cycles of association. Columbus into the destiny and will of the Atlantic: two lovers into the harbor, the harbor into the sea: a subway into a transcontinental railroad, into a continent, into a River; the River into the Gulf; the Indianprincess into the Earth Mother and her dance into the tumult and traffic of the nation; ribald South Street into a vision—while the Bridge brings the clippers that bring China—of Atlantis. Now, the movement turns back toward crystallisation. "Cape Harteras" at first invokes the geologic age that lifted the Appalachians above the waters; the cosmic struggle sharpens into the birth of the airplane—industrial America; the "red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas" gives us, finally, Walt Whitman. "Years of the Modern! Propulsions toward what capes?" The Saunterer on the Open Road takes the hand of the poet. Part Five, "Three Songs," is a pause for humbler music, upon the variable theme of woman. Part Six, "Quaker Hill," is an attempt to focus the cosmic journey once more upon the person of the poet. In my judgment, it fails for the same basic reasons. And now, Part Seven, "The Tunnel," runs swift and fatefully to the climax. The poet, in mid air at midnight, leaves the Bridge; he "comes down to earth" and returns home as he had left, by subway. This unreal collapse of bridge into subway has meaning. The subway is the tunnel; is the whole life of the city entextured of all the images created by the Poem, all the previous apparitions of earth and sun. The tunnel is America, and is a kind of hell. But it has dynamic direction, it is moving! In the plunging subway darkness, appears Poe:

And why do I often meet your visage here,Your eyes like agate lanterns . . . ?

If the reader understands Poe, he will understand the apparition. Of all the classic poets of the great tradition in America, Poe—perhaps the least as artist—was the most advanced, the most prophetic as thinker. All, as we have noted, were content more or less with the merely transplanted terms of an agrarian culture. Only Poe guessed the transfiguring effect of the Machine upon the forms of human life, upon the very concept of the person. The Tunnel gives us man in his industrial hell which the machine—his hand and heart—has made; now let the machine be his godlike Hand to uplift him! The plunging subway shall merge with the vaulting bridge. Whitman gives the vision; Poe, however vaguely, the method. The final part, "Atlantis," is a transposed return to the beginning. The Bridge, in Time, has linked Atlantis with Cathay. Now it becomes an absolute experience. Like any human event, fully known, it links man instantaneously, "beyond time," with the Truth.

D

The structural pattern of The Bridge is superb: a man moves of a morning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, returns at midnight, each stage of his course adumbrating, by the mystic law of continuity, into American figures with cosmic overtones; and all caught up in a mythic bridge whose functional span is a parabola and an immediate act of vision. The flaw lies in the weakness of the personal crystallisation upon which the vision rests, as the Bridge is spanned upon its piers. This flaw gets into the idiom and texture. Sometimes the image blurs, the sequence breaks, the plethora of words is blinding. There is even, in the development of certain figures, a tendency toward inflation which one is tempted to connect with the febrile, false ebullience of the American epoch (1924-1929) in which the Poem was written. Yet the concept is sound; the poet's genius has on the whole equalled his ambition. Even the failings in execution, since they are due to weakness of the personal focus, help to express the epoch; for it is in the understanding and creating of persons that our rapidly collectivising age is poorest.

Crane's myth must, of course, not be confused with the myth as we find it in Homer or the Bible or the Nibelungen. The Bridge is not a particularised being to be popularly sung; it is a conceptual symbol to be used. And the fact that this symbol begins as a man-constructed thing is of the essence of its truth for our instrumental age. From a machine-made entity, the Poem makes the Bridge into a machine. But it has beauty. This means that through the men who builded it, the life of America has flowed into the Bridge—the life of our past and our future. A cosmic content has given beauty to the Bridge; now it must give it a poetic function. From being a machine of body, it becomes an instrument of spirit. The Bridge is matter made into human action.

We may confidently say that this message of The Bridge will be more comprehensible in the future (not in the immediate future), when the functionally limited materialism of our collectivist era has, through success, grown inadequate to the deepened needs of a mankind released from economic insecurity and prepared, by leisure, for regeneration. For even as necessity, today and tomorrow, drives most men to think collectively in order that they may survive; necessity, day after tomorrow, will drive men to think personally (poetically, cosmically), in order that their survival may have meaning. When the collectivist era has done its work—the abolition of economic classes and of animal want—men will turn, as only the privileged of the past could ever turn, toward the discovery of Man.

But when that time comes, the message of The Bridge will be taken for granted; it will be too obvious, even as today it is too obscure, for general interest. The revelation in Crane's poems, however, of a man who through the immediate conduit of his senses experienced the organic unity between his self, the objective world, and the cosmos, will be accepted as a great human value. And the poems, whose very texture reveals and sings this man, will be remembered.