SOURCE: ""The Bridge': "Too Impossible An Ambition?"" in Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 83-109; 121-23.

[In the following essay, Berthoff uses other criticism and Crane's own correspondence to evaluate the success or failure of The Bridge.]

No one now pays much attention to Edgar Allan Poe's famous pronouncement, delivered in the apprehensive dawn of literary modernism, that given natural limits to human responsiveness there can be no such thing as a satisfactory long poem; only short compositions machined to produce a single affective impression can be admired straight through. Yet understanding Poe's peremptory rule for what it was, a one-sided, problem-solving response to the pre-modernist breakdown of classicalhumanist norms of use and value (and to the underlying redistribution of cultural authority), we may have to grant that something oddly like its model of performative excellence still thrives among us. Our newest academic criticism, grown aggressively skeptical and subtilizing in addressing literary texts, appears correspondingly uncertain in its dealings with the entirety of literary works. In the transactions of imaginative literature the first indeterminacy, the unreliability hardest to correct for—to apply terms now much in vogue—appear to be our own. Faced with work that merely by reason of length has to be talked about abstractly and summarizingly, and that in the singularity of its actual making would resist descriptive reconstruction in any case, we retreat to favored presuppositions about its essential office and use. We hypothesize for it some preemptive single line of meaning, the hermeneutic counterpart to Poe's affective uniformity; we extract some dominant configuration of expressive reference (or aporia-creating nonreference), and we pin critical description to that. An anticipatory and, in the event, totalizing textual positivism becomes ourfall-back position, our means of staying in business—on our own declared terms.

In the case of The Bridge, the "long lyric poem, with interrelated sections" (as Hart Crane would finally describe it) that in 1930 became his second published volume, it may be argued that two presuppositions in particular have regularly worked to distract appreciation.¹The first of these controlled much of the early commentary; fixing on the poem's synoptic canvass of American history and myth, it is the view that success or failure in The Bridge necessarily depends on the coherence of its imaginative rendering of the totality of American experience, from a mythic past to the incitements and confusions of the present age. This was Allen Tate's tactical premise, and it effectively prejudged the poem's main purpose as one incapable of realization. "We know," Tate wrote, "that Crane's [subject] is the greatness of America." But this sublime subject is simply not "structurally clarified." Nor could it have been, the implication is, since it is, a priori, a subject "capable of elucidation neither on the logical plane nor in terms of a generally known idea of America." As a result the symbolism of the poem's central argument, including the grand figure of the bridge itself, is undelivered: "The historical plot of the poem, which is the groundwork on which the symbolic bridge stands, is arbitrary and broken.²

Admittedly this way of reading and judging The Bridge can be supported by several of Crane's own explanatory formulations—"Very roughly, it concerns a mystical synthesis of "America' (February 18, 1923); "a new cultural synthesis in terms of our America" (December 3, 1925); "What I am really handling, you see, is the Myth of America" (September 12, 1927). With each of these statements we need to take some account of the occasion. They mainly come (like the first, to Gorham Munson) at The Bridge's excited inception early in 1923, which was also the moment of Crane's least qualified adherence to his New York friends' campaign for a "new consciousness," a national reawakening, or else (like the next two) in letters to Otto Kahn outlining objectively impressive reasons for Kahn's continuing support.³ By contrast, when Crane is writing about The Bridge to Yvor Winters theme and argumentative intention, if discussed at all, are made secondary to performative issues. A letter, for instance, in which Crane takes up Winters's evident skepticism about "modern epics" puts its answering emphasis on the compositional effort to release the "true luminous reality" of his chosen materials—"I'm engrossed in a thousand problems of form and material all at once these days" (November 15, 1926). This letter's point of arrival has already been noted; it is the postulation of that ideal moment "when one's work suddenly stands up, separate and moving of itself with its own sudden life." As with the lyrics of White Buildings what most absorbed Crane, once settled on his poem's basic program, was pursuit of this clinching autonomy of statement, this specifically poetic authenticity. In a subsequent letter he reports to Winters the pleasure he takes, with what has so far got written of The Bridge, in ""pottering' over such sections as have seemed to lack a final sense of conviction" (March 6, 1927).

The second main presupposition, building on a contrary sense that the historical material is incidental to an essentially private psychodrama, fixes on the poet's own omnipresent role as his poem's burdened and questing protagonist. In this view The Bridge is to be read as product and record of an exemplary progression, achieved or aborted, toward subjective fulfillment or wholeness. Some such conception is implicit in the title, "The Long Way Home," chosen by Sherman Paul for his strongly affirmative 120-page reenactment of the poem's structured advance, and has been worked through with stricter insistence in Edward Brunner's detailed study of the progressive "making" of The Bridge. It is Brunner's contention that the poem's proper design, free of needless additions Crane forced himself to write after losing confidence in what he had completed by the winter of 1926-1927, is that of a "developing narrative .. . in which the poet continually [comes] up against examples of his own inadequacy and struggle[s] to work beyond them" (Splendid Failure, 183). This view also has documentary support. Writing to Munson in April of 1926, with the whole enterprise still in suspension, Crane appears to recognize that all the imaged expansions attaching to his central bridge symbol may themselves have become a blocking factor, and that creative "fusion" will depend on the complementary release of somethingprivate or personal. "I'm afraid I've so systematically objectified my theme and its details that the necessary 'subjective lymph and sinew' is frozen" (April 5, 1926).

The most persuasive commentaries on The Bridge—and both Paul's and Brunner's are, within their premises, vigorously persuasive—are likely in some fashion to combine these evaluative presuppositions. What links them is the assumption that the main work of the poem is to enact a substantial and continuous referential argument; consequently criticism's concern must be to find out whether and by what means the argument, as staged, coheres. But this may be a guardian's concern more than it is the poet's own (beyond the commonsense notion that any practice of a valued art is worth testing against the demands of some subject or occasion of major consequence). Whatever the subject, the poet's immediate question is likely to be closer to the question Emily Dickinson put to the Boston literary eminence who was her one solicited reader. "Are you too deeply occupied," she famously asked Colonel Higginson, "to say if my verse is alive?" If the work is not performatively "alive," no structure or plot will save it and certainly no affectation of moral, psychological, historical wisdom. (Isn't this after all the point of Henry James's sly fable, "The Figure in the Carpet," with its mockery of misdirected critical inquisitiveness?) "A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways," Pasternak wrote in Doctor Zhivago (IX, 4), "by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art," the least particle of which "outweighs all the other ingredients in significance and turns out to be the essence, the heart and soul of the work."

For Hart Crane, at any rate, the project of The Bridge, which sprang into his mind in February of 1923 in the compounded excitement of driving "Faustus and Helen" to completion and inwardly preparing what then seemed a final drastic break from Cleveland, was first of all a conscious putting at risk of his own passionate vocation. Preoccupied from the start with the job of transmuting "history and fact, location, etc. . . . into abstract form that would almost function independently of its subject matter," he warily acknowledged that "the actual statement of the thing, the marshalling of the forces, will take me months, at best"—in the end it took him six and a half interrupted years—"and I may have to give it up entirely before that; it may be too impossible an ambition" (February 18, 1923). But at every stage of his work on The Bridge and through every interruption he understood it as a critical test of the conception of poetry he had begun to realize in the early 1920s and had powerfully reaffirmed in his best work of 1924-1925, most of all in "Voyages II" and "V," "At Melville's Tomb," and "Repose of Rivers." Arguably it is in this particular sense that John Unterecker was most right in observing that Crane never deviated from his initial vision of the poem (Unterecker, 279).

[A third presupposition about The Bridge, where it is not simply a version of the second autobiographic one, is a presupposition bound to flourish during an interval that finds Wallace Stevens widely promoted as our era's best model for a major, a "strong," poetry. It is that poetry itself is the subject and problematic protagonist of a poem which still, in this view, is judged to succeed or fail by virtue of its running action or "plot." R. W. B. Lewis has summed up such readings as well as anyone: "The plot of The Bridge is the gradual permeation of an entire culture by the power of poetic vision" (Lewis, 382). Recognizing an arbitrariness in the poem's over-all design—"nothing in [Crane's] conception dictates the exact order or the exact number of its parts'—Lewis appeals effectively to Kenneth Burke's postulation of "repetitive" as against "conventional" (i.e., narrative or dramatic) form. The poem's separate parts, though not insistently sequential, do ""speak to one another' and "open out' into each other." Yet the argument as made still requires notions of "progression" or "accumulation" and the steady building of something called "momentum," until at last "beauty and harmony have come again . . . and the poem is done." An initial question about this argument and its plangent conclusion has to be whether or not it was preordained by a particular reader's desire for it or expectation of something like it in any grandly accomplished poem.]

On the issue of how most advantageously to frame this ambitious test—whatmaterials to fill his poem out with, what order to follow, and even what voice or speaking presence to use in different parts—Crane changed his mind and plans more than once. In mid-1923, with one high-flown fragment of forty-three lines on paper, he spoke of a poem roughly "four or five times" longer (that is, half again as long as "Faustus and Helen"), to be written throughout in the same exalted idiom. Expecting to finish it "within a year," he saw it as rounding out his first collection: "I am especially anxious to finish it . . . because then I shall have all my best things brought out in book form" (July 21, 1923). Early in 1926, with a "finale" still the one drafted section, he was again projecting not more than "five or six" additional parts (March 5, 1926). Some parts of The Bridge, which runs as printed to eight numbered sections and fifteen separate poems, seem not to have been planned at all. Writing to Waldo Frank in the bounteous late summer of 1926, Crane describes two of the "Three Songs" as having suddenly "popped out" (August 12, 1926); no section with that name appears in the detailed outline drawn up a few months earlier for Otto Kahn (March 18, 1926). A section given the title "John Brown" and later "Calgary Express," described in mid-August of 1926 as "largely finished," disappeared from the poem between the winter of 1926-27, when it was listed in a plan sent to Yvor Winters, and the next summer. (Elements of this, possibly whole stanzas, survive in "The River," written during June and July of 1927, but the notion that it would take in, by way of a sleeping-car porter's ruminations, "the whole racial history of the Negro in America" has effectively vanished.) A short section called "The Mango Tree," marked as "completed" in the same numbered plan, also got dropped early in 1927.⁴

What all this reasonably suggests is that the final organization and sequence of The Bridge are in some considerable measure accidental. Crane might well defend his work-in-progress, against self-doubt as much as anything, by appealing to conceptions of an "organic" ordering and "fusion" (November 15, 1926, and passim) and of a full "assimilation" and "final welding" of all elements (September 12, 1927). Yet it seems likely enough that in different circumstances additional lyric sections might have been added at any of several points in the final design. Similarly we can imagine judging the achievement of the poem more or less as we do now if certain of its fifteen composed parts had never existed; these include not only a late addition like "Indiana" but sections as commonly admired as "The Harbor Dawn," "Van Winkle," "Cutty Sark," or "Three Songs." Fairly obviously not too much of the poem we now read could be removed or go unreplaced without damage to the whole. A certain amplitude and duration are essential, however achieved. Indeed, these properties—amplitude, abundance, variety, mass, duration—have as much to do with the poem's success as, within rough limits, any particular selection of materials and episodes. There are self-evident reasons why the prayerful soliloquy given to Columbus in "Ave Maria" stands near the beginning, and the sonnet-length coda appended to "The Tunnel" and leading us back to the river and the harbor's edge makes a suitable transition to the soaring "Atlantis" hymn with which the poem ends. (This coda's final broken outcry as well as other lines toward the end of "The Tunnel" were brought over in the summer of 1926 from the draft of "Atlantis" Crane had shown Waldo Frank the previous January: see Brom Weber, Hart Crane, Appendix C.) But for The Bridge as a whole only the two formal hymns which initiate and conclude the poem's design are strictly mandated in Crane's determining conception and are positioned where they have to be.⁵

Otherwise it would need only to be a "large form," as in the rush of its realization he wrote Frank (August 12, 1926). Nothing but that would provide space for all the violently tensile "impressions and concepts" he felt himself once again handling freely and openly. The imaginative data most important to him invariably came to him in radical doubleness, the fear of their dissolution inwrought in the excitement and startled joy of receiving them; and an "architectural" poetry as Crane conceived of it was one that above all found expressive room, in the part and in the whole, for each of these determining propulsions. Taking the argument one step further, we might also say that this relative unconcern for any strict program of thematic progression, this macro-organizational casualness and openness, proved fundamental in the creation of a poetry embodying that "fulness, of experience" Robert Lowell would attributeto Crane's work, that power to speak from "the center of things" without getting "sidetracked" even by the most chaotic incentives.

Such freedom brought with it its own intensifications. Crane wrote again to Frank during that same break-through summer of his delight at the recurrences materializing within his poem's fast-shifting panorama of "motives and situations." It seemed to him that "every circumstance and incident" were now, at last, "flock[ing] toward a positive center of action, control and beauty" (August 19 and 23, 1926). In discouragement he might speak, as he had done six weeks earlier, of losing "all faith in my material" (early July 1926).⁶ But the faith needed to sustain him through The Bridge would be that faith in his own released powers which his best earlier lyric verse had confirmed him in and that only the renewed act of writing—as when, that summer, he felt himself "dancing on dynamite," with "all sections moving forward now at once"—could keep alive for him.

2

All this is not to say that the material particulars of The Bridge—"history and fact, location, etc."—were not calculatingly chosen and sorted out. One circumstance that made immediately plausible the idea of combining episodes from a reimagined American past with events and passions out of contemporary life was simply the wide currency projects of a comparable sort already had in the literary adventuring of 1918 and after. Writings on comprehensive national themes by the literary generation just ahead of Crane's—the critical manifestoes of Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank's visionary propagandizing, Mencken's public diatribes, the controversies over issues in cultural and institutional life occupying journals like The New Republic, The Seven Arts, and The Dial—gained new urgency and point from the traumas of the war experience and the rapid dissolution of the Progressive era's long festival of public hopefulness. What was now set in motion for imaginative and polemical writing alike was nothing less than a prolonged national self-audit, a prophetic reexamination of American behavior in relation to its known historical origins.

After 1918 poets, novelists, historians, publicists and policy lobbyists all were enlisted, in one or another fashion, into this collective undertaking. Its mark is on every kind of imaginative project. These were the years of grandscale revisionist histories like the Beards' Rise of American Civilization and V. L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought; of biographies as iconoclastic as Brook's The Ordeal of Mark Twain or as lavishly mythicizing as Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln (too "milk sick" in its manner for Crane's taste: letter to Winters, October 5, 1926); of Dreiser's elegiac Twelve Men and the poignant inquest of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (a "chapter in the Bible of [America's] consciousness," Crane wrote at twenty in The Pagan; "America should read this book on her knees"); of Harold Stearns's acerbic symposium Civilization in the United States in 1923; of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and of the parabolic narrative climaxes, each one New York-centered, of Cummings's The Enormous Room, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Edmund Wilson's I Thought of Daisy; of Paul Rosenfeld's celebrative Port of New York and Alfred Stieglitz's continuing promotion at Gallery 291 of a city-based art keyed to an unprecedented social reality (it was in writing to Stieglitz that Crane defined the contemporary city as "a place of "brokenness' where either "a new stage is created, or must be, arbitrarily, or there is a foreshortening, a loss and a premature disintegration of experience": July 4, 1923); of Dos Passos's cinematic Manhattan Transfer, with childhood delights and fears presented as continuous with the headlined violences of contemporary city life; of the visionary representationalism, in painting metropolitan scenes, of John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, and of Joseph Stella, whose abstractive series on the Brooklyn Bridge dates from the beginning of the "20s; of, further along, the inception of "epic" undertakings like Stephen Benet's John Brown's Body, Dos Passos's U. S. Á., MacLeish's Conquistador, also of the American cantos of Pound's master effort; and of (not least pertinent to the sensibility at work in The Bridge) the new seriousness and generosity in such appraisals of popular and indigenous culture as Gilbert Seldes's The Seven Lively Arts, Constance Rourke's Trumpets of Jubilee and its successors, and the ethnographer John Collier'sexplorations, beginning in 1923, of American Indian consciousness.

Crane had, characteristically, his own rationale for what he was attempting. "I must, perforce, use the materials of the time," he told Yvor Winters, "or the terms of my material will lack edge,—reality" (February 26, 1927). We may understand this working principle as including, for any artist, not only what he himself has known directly but the materials and themes shared with his most adventurous contemporaries. What Crane took from the literary climate of the mid-1920s thus included the conviction that his poem's "conquest of consciousness" would remain substantially incomplete if it did not reach out to encompass collective and historical actions and memories. To such an end American materials will serve an American poet not, as he wrote in "General Aims and Theories," because "America has any so-called par value as a state or as a group of people" but because, being more deeply instinctive with him and at the same time already having a certain formalized acceptance, they can better help achieve an effectively "autonomous" construct, a poem moving out on "an orbit or predetermined direction of its own." (This is a view of the relation between poetic authority and popular attitudes and conventions that becomes less paradoxical-sounding the more you think it through.)

One new work in particular by an American contemporary, the set of historiographic re-creations William Carlos Williams published in In the American Grain (1925), struck Crane as coming so near his scheme for The Bridge that he made a point of standing off from it. So at least he told Winters a year after its publication: "I don't want to read In the American Grain until I get through with Bridge" (November 12, 1926). Nine days later he seems to have read Williams's book after all, telling Waldo Frank it was "an achievement that I'd be proud of (November 21, 1926):

A most important and sincere book. I'm very enthusiastic—I put off reading it, you know, 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 as 1 had symbolized for him in "The Tunnel" section.⁷

But an authorial persona figures in the various chapters of In the American Grain as recorder and commentator rather than as an integrally dramatized participant; delivering revisionist judgements about America's historical past and its legacy is Williams's organizing pursoe. And since our first concern with The Bridge is not its textual foundations but its performative logic or combinatoire, there seems to me a more immediate interest in putting beside it an earlier specifically poetic American precedent, the 1855 poem of Walt Whitman's that we now know as "The Sleepers."

In a long poem meant—among other motives at work in The Bridge's making—to show past and present bound into a living continuum it is hardly surprising to find Whitman as, under his own name, a solicited elder presence. The poem's fourth numbered section, "Cape Hatteras," was planned, so Crane told Otto Kahn, as "a kind of ode to Whitman" (September 12, 1927); in it, besides explicit references to particular titles and phrasings—"Children of Adam," "Recorders Ages Hence," Paumanok, "Out of the Cradle," "Years of the Modern," "Song of the Open Road"—Whitman is projected as the master maker and originator of Crane's leading symbol. The oddly stilted lines clinching this tribute conclude an unusual stanza in heroic couplets:

Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel;
And it was thou who on the boldest heel
Stood up and flung the span on even wing
Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!

The Bridge carries no overt allusion to "The Sleepers," which in any case is a noticeably shorter poem and comes into the 1855 Leaves of Grass as a kind of nighttime supplement to "Song of Myself (to give this much longer section of Leaves its final title). But "The Sleepers" constitutes a self-completing unitwithin the larger work, and what directly links it to The Bridge is Whitman's introduction into it of a series of episodes from past American life and history, to complement and extend his poetry's regular fusion of first-person rhapsody and the generic experience presenting itself to his imaginative witness.⁸

The framing action of "The Sleepers" is the poet's night journey through the gathered democracy of human sleep, where all alike—the comfortable and the afflicted, old and young, male and female, murderer and murdered, the new-born and the dying—come to rest under his assimilative gaze. Lines of brooding sympathy with all human suffering co-exist with lines of rough-neck ebullience and a startling erotic candor (this particularly in an elevenline passage, completing what is now the poem's long first section, that directly mimes sexual dreaming: "Ö hotcheeked and blushing . . ."—lines withdrawn from more circumspect later printings). But my immediate concern is with the series of historical and quasihistorical scenes filling out the middle sections of "The Sleepers." These are, first of all, scenes of defeat and loss, of suffering and sorrow, and of the end of things or at the least of an inexorable attenuation of life's promises—though in the peaceable kingdom of the poem's closing passage all souls are envisioned as waking again to full life in the "invigoration" and "chemistry" of the night. In this expressive emphasis Whitman anticipated an intuition fundamental to The Bridge's panoramic unfolding: that a significant public myth, irrepressible as it may be in its self-engendering power of renewal, may gain final clarification as much through an accounting of those excluded from its promise as in representations of those most eloquent in proclaiming it.

So in the second section of "The Sleepers" the poet, his communing self turned passive and elegiac, enters in imaginative preparation the bodies of an aged woman and of a sleepless and grieving widow, then becomes no more than a blank shround in an underground coffin; but in the third and fourth sections he is a watcher again as, in succession, a "gigantic" swimmer and (in what is specified as a "past-reading") a battered ship move from the open sea to destruction on rocky shores. In the section following we enter the specifically historical past, with two episodes from the American Revolution. The first of these presents the hero Washington—not in glowing defiance as in Blake's America but after the defeat at Brooklyn—grieving at the slaughter of his young troops; in the second he relinquishes command at the war's end and, embracing one by one his weeping officers, bids good-bye to the disbanding army. The next section, the sixth, divides in the 1855 text into two distinct parts. There is first a story recalled by the poet's mother from girl-hood when a solitary Indian woman came to her family's house one early morning—a figure beautiful, mysterious, with "free and elastic step"—but went away in mid-afternoon and "never came nor was heard of there again"; then a strange intense passage in which the poet, identifying himself as "Lucifer" ("Black Lucifer" in a draft fragment), speaks as a slave, curses the man who has "defiled" him, and ends transformed into an agent of preternatural revenge:

Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale's bulk ..
. it seems mine,
Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and
sluggish, my tap is death.

Deftly here the two great institutional crimes in America's long history, genocide and race slavery, have been given their place, too, along with a premonition of grim consequences still to be enacted, in the poem's synoptic myth.

The climactic seventh section of "The Sleepers," which now follows, is equally remarkable. A quick return to happier matters—a "show" (appropriate formal word) of love and summer, light and air, autumn harvest and filled barns—expands into a more comprehensive vision of "elements" merging back into some primal wholeness, and then, abruptly, of fugitive uprooted souls returning in their dreams to a life and world irrevocably lost to them:

... the immigrant is back beyond months and
years;
The poor Irishman lives in the simple house of his
childhood, with
wellknown neighbors and faces,
They warmly welcome him, he is barefoot again,
he forgets he is well off,
The Dutchman voyages home.. ..

—so the vision develops, in Whitmanesque amplitude and detail, of a nation of exiles and strangers whose single dream is strikingly antithetical to the one commonly professed. Beneath our sanctified American dream, "The Sleepers" acknowledges at this interior climax, lies the American sadness, the broken life of contrary passions and sorrows that only the poet's own reconciling pledge ("I swear they are averaged now") can imagine restoring to equity and wholeness.⁹ And since this controlling vision is one revealed in its completeness at every stage of American history, the form chosen for presenting it is not a continuous narrative but what may properly be called a lyric pageant, in which an emblazoned succession of independent yet concordant scenes of past and present life is framed between opening and closing attestations by the pageant-master poet himself. As with The Bridge the order of the scenes is not strictly binding, and we can imagine a greater or lesser number of them. What counts is a certain affective range and mass in the full sequence. Despite all obvious differences in scale "The Sleepers," so described, may be read, I would say, as a confirming anticipation of the performative architecture worked out for The Bridge.

3

Lyric pageant, lyric suite on epideictic (or celebratory) materials and themes: a genre classification of The Bridge, if one is wanted, has only to take account of Crane's faithfulness to his own mastered style of intensifying lyric apostrophe and at the same time his extension of this style to the scale of the collective and historical. The poet's work of "analysis and discovery" moves out not only onto a broader stage but one—that of the continuing "matter of America"—already foregrounded in his first audience's expectation.¹⁰ It must be granted that certain of the formal claims Crane himself advanced in support of his grand effort have been as prejudicial to judgment as were certain of Whitman's brasher self-promotions, though we may note again that past the moment of inception in February of 1923 it is mainly in reports to Otto Kahn that claims to an "epic" form and "symphonic" organization are pressed into service. ("It is at least a symphony with an epic theme," Crane wrote his benefactor on September 12, 1927, in the course of asking for a further subsidy.) By Ezra Pound's bluff definition of epic—"a poem including history"—The Bridge's qualifications are unimpeachable." But a straightforward remark earlier in the same letter to Otto Kahn, commenting on the "unique problem of form" presented by each section, comes nearer to describing what we are actually given in The Bridge. "Each [section] is a separate canvas," Crane explains, even though "none yields its entire significance" unless seen in relation to the others. The poem will hold us more by the displayed inventiveness of its successive parts, the autonomy and force of their separate execution, than by any fully constituted and sustained action or theme.¹²

The felt continuity of The Bridge is thus first of all in the recurrence across richly varied materials of a consistent intensity of lyric (apostrophic) statement. In each section of the poem, figures and forms of affective energy—confident or despairing, guileless or corrupted, prolific or devouring (Blake's words seem directly appropriate here), but all attached firmly to a real temporal and historical world—are put in relation to some actively responsive matrix of being (sometimes represented as a particular woman); and in each section the encounter moves across, as its reciprocal dynamic develops, to a particular tableau or voiced pledge not of resolution but of full continuing engagement. Throughout The Bridge what is felt as the theme beneath the theme is, in a word, power—and is not this the theme or subject presenting itself for realization in any major art? Certainly, so Crane himself had come to believe, it is the matter vitally at issue in both the artist's and the true scientist's creative passion. The imaginative strength of The Bridge, in this view, develops from its concrete rendering of the inflections of power in power's three great identifiable modes—in the universale of human self-being and of human love's literally ecstatic conviction, in all existence as phenomenally apprehended, and in the singular occurrences of a given people's recoverable history—in each mode to be validated by the refiguring power of the poet's own abstractive andformalizing language.

So in each section of The Bridge we are summoned into a contestation of invoked powers. (Audibly summoned in the exclamatory syntax opening several early sections: "How many dawns . . . ," "Be with me, Luis de San Angel, now—," "Stick your patent name on a signboard/ brother—".) Some essential contrariety, some reflexive opposition of self-legitimizing protagonists or life-agencies—they may be wholly natural, or suprapersonal—becomes the center of reference in a formalized enactment of promise and frustration, or postponement; of joining and sundering—kinesthetic patterns carrying the flow and recoil of feeling throughout the poem; of convergences and severances that, deriving with equal force from the condition of all existence, remain equally active in the voiced reconciliation or stasis each section contrives at its end." Coincidentally some provisionally recuperative scene flashes forth in each section that is never fully realized—or, in a phrase from the dedicatory opening, "never disclosed"—in the ideal of itself which draws thought after it, though that ideal remains unimpaired as a locus of imaginative attraction. In a double sense possibilities of "epic" consummation do pull this poetry forward and are undiminished by being always and necessarily deferred; their reality to the imagination is in the affective desiring that irrepressibly generates them. Thus in the poem's specifically historical moments and episodes the progression is toward some restored communion of purpose and, specifically, some right way of occupying the collective estate (for which the land, the continent itself, is a primary symbol) and of entering all the occasions of its distinguishing history; here, too, consummations are felt as immanent that are never once and for all "disclosed" but always again "foretold," with unabated power to undiminished expectation.

[The part given in The Bridge to music and dance, the purest of our formalizations of power and desire, is scarcely accidental. Musical figures and references—assimilative harmonies, ritual chants, discords that "part / Our hearing"—enter every section of the poem, from the Angelus and Te Deum of "Ave Maria" (not to mention the "water-swell rhythm" Crane claimed for this section: July 26, 1926) to the industrial world's "nasal whine of power" in "Cape Hatteras" and the burlesque show's "tom-tom scrimmage" in "National Winter Garden." In "The Harbor Dawn" we hear of gong warnings, singing sirens (a calculated pun, surely), the "far strum of fog horns," and the lovers' own "singing arms"; in "Van Winkle" a grinding hurdy-gurdy; in "The River" the nostalgic songs of hoboes, road gangs, steamboat men; in "The Dance" the pounded rhythms of a tribal rite; in "Cutty Sark" a nickel-in-the-slot pianola balanced by the litany of clipper-ship names ("Music still haunts [them]," Crane told Otto Kahn); in "Cape Hatteras" Whitman's conglomerate singing, correlative with gypsy songs and bird notes, over against modern radio static and the hum of dynamos; in each of the "Three Songs" the eponymous form itself; in "Quaker Hill" hotel dance music against the whippoorwill's pastoral augury of fear and pain; in the subway plunge of "The Tunnel," hell's own phonographs and the "serenade" of screeching equipment; and at both ends of the poem's pageantry the choiring wind-harp rapturously invoked as an avatar of the bridge itself. (The epigraph from Plato introducing "Atlantis," The Bridge's final section, makes explicit music's supervisory role.) By Crane's own account different sections of the poem imitate particular musical forms. "Cutty Sark," he told Kahn, "is built on the plan of a fugue" with "two "voices' . . . interwoven in the action" (September 12, 1927), while to Winters he spoke of "The River" as composing a "hieratic largo"—"It is timed insofar as I have been able to time it, every word and beat is measured and weighed," to the end of "slightly vary[ing] a continuous and (I think) desirable underlying monotony of rhythm" (July 5, 1927). This line of consideration may also put us on somewhat better terms with "Indiana," commonly disparaged as abjectly sentimental. With its rhymed and typographically staggered quatrains this lyric section points us formally toward the mode of folksong and popular ballad; so it announces itself in the opening verse as a song and continues to the end with the abstracting intimacy of voice characteristic of ballad recitative as a mode.]

The "field of possibilities" opened through the figure and symbol of the bridge virtually exploded once Crane hit on it—its "mystic possibilities" he was pleasedto say in the excitement of beginning to track them. But some of his anticipatory claims for it have, again, proved more distracting than helpful. Neither his initial projection, in letters, of the bridge itself as "symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity . . . also our scientific hopes and achievements of the future" (February 18, 1923) nor his identification of it three years later, still with only one section written, as "a ship, a world, a woman, a tremendous harp" (January 18, 1926) is immediately useful in entering the poem Crane actually wrote. The real solidity of the bridge figure is that as directly invoked it never ceases to be concretely and circumstantially itself. (In the Black Sun printing of The Bridge Walker Evans's three sharpangled photographs reinforce this concreteness.) With Hart Crane at his best there is always something representationally solid and self-organizing to fix attention, and to answer factually the question "What might the Brooklyn Bridge be taken as symbolizing?" can give us as much purchase as we need on the imaginative contexts the poem works to re-establish.

As a visible structure of steel and stone joining two divided sectors of a huge modern city across, day and night, a free space of sky and flowing waters, the bridge is at once an extraordinary feat of industrial engineering and, in the boldness of its conception, an equally extraordinary imaginative act. Its stone towers and metal cables lift skyward with a geometric grace that for grandeur and erected strength matches anything to be found either in nature or in past history. Yet its practical service is merely to speed up the daily traffic of a mechanized civilization, a frantic new iron age—and to furnish a superior platform for this civilization's bedlamites and suicides. So perceived, the bridge looms as both a master trope for all adventuring, all crossing or abrogating of boundaries, all imaginative voyaging, and as an icon of the fatality hanging over any passionately risked human undertaking. How this title metaphor rides over the whole poem and what actions and correlations attach to it are epitomized in the opening hymn "To Brooklyn Bridge"—"almost the best thing I've ever written," Crane jubilantly told Waldo Frank at the moment of completing it (July 24, 1926).¹⁴ Simply the first four of its eleven vividly sequenced stanzas form an introductory synopsis of algebraic precision and elegance. The dawn arc of a seagull's tumultuous flight—high over "chained bay waters" to the monument to Liberty it seems itself to have raised up—remains as an inviolate apparition above the business files, plunging elevators, and movie-house phantasms of the mechanized city world and leads thought directly back to the arching freedom of the bridge itself; in the "ever unspent" motion of the bridge's huge stride even the sun discovers its daily orbit. More of any day's common events synecdochally follow. A suicide climbs the bridge's heights and jumps (in a line, however—"A jest falls from the speechless caravan"—somewhat too nearly recalling the feature-journalism ironies of O. Henry's storytelling; it does not seem to me this poem's best moment). Then the immense system of light and air that Brooklyn Bridge shares with lower Manhattan's office towers and oceanic outlook organizes a vividly concrete stanza—

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

—a stanza also continuing the dialectic of incandescent violence and some saving antithesis, of power gone amok and the unreduced promise of transcendence.

The animate suggestion in "breathe" cues, through the next two stanzas, attributions to the bridge of godlike powers and, coordinately, a shift in voicing from awed description to supplication:

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,—^l5

A final quatrain, besides outlining the historical geography still to be explored of river, sea, and the "prairies' dreaming sod," resumes and completes this transformation into prayer—but not before we are given two more stanza-long projections of the bridge's iconographic import: how it compacts within itself the contraries of wholeness and brokenness, timeless expectancy and the self-consuming rush of human life; how in particular its "Everpresence" (to bring down another name for it from the poem's final section) mediates the unceasing agon of this rapid-transit, office-block world. Characteristically these two stanzas' descriptive precision and (never to be overlooked with Hart Crane) metrical, syntactical, idiomatic firmness serve to anchor in common fact and common apprehension the dedication's closing movement:

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

This dedicatory section's final lines, fixing again on the bridge's geometric grandeur, form a hyperbole that brings to a climax the poet-supplicant's rapt absorption. "And of the curveship lend a myth to God"—it is a patently risky formulation. But against arguments that this is empty rhetoric, or blasphemy, or both, ordinary rules of expressive context and progression surely allow us to read this closure dramatistically and provisionally rather than as a statement of Crane's own settled belief or even of his determining purpose in writing The Bridge. What it enacts is a certain state of mind, that one in which the category of the sacred forces itself back into conscious experience.

4

"Ave Maria," first in The Bridge's main sequence of episodes and panels, exemplifies Crane's stated ambition to show "the continuous and living evidence of the past in the inmost vital substance of the present" (September 12, 1927). In constructing it he worked directly from Columbus's printed journal, among other textual resources. This section's prosodic form—a series of intermittently rhymed pentameter octaves, breaking off at the end into a staggered couplet of exclamation—has a formality appropriate to its conventionally heroic subject. Staged as a recollective meditation and concluding prayer, it places its speaking protagonist not at the high moment of new-world landfall but on the voyage back into the skepticisms and treacheries of imperial Europe. The recollective first part's climaxes do come, though, in recreating the great moment when visionary belief was staggeringly confirmed—

. . . Then faith, not fear
Nigh surged me witless. . . . Hearing the surf
near—
I, wonder-breathing, kept the watch,—saw
The first palm chevron the first lighted hill.

—then in evoking in mid-ocean, suspended between the old and new land worlds, "this third, of water," signifying in its self-sufficient immensity the sum of all that bewilderingly "tests" the "word" of our faith yet also promises completion and wholeness, a final rounding into light:

Series on series [of wave's], infinite,—till eyes
Starved wide on blackened tides, accrete—enclose
This turning rondure whole, this crescent ring
Sun-cusped and zoned with modulated fire. . . .

The title "Ave Maria" notwithstanding, the sustained prayer that forms this section's second part is directed not to Mary but to an ocean god of "plenitude"and "holocaust" combined, one of whose avatars is the creative-destructive fire made visible to Columbus in his ship's corposants and in the "garnet" flare of Teneriffe's volcanic cone. The consummation liturgically unfolded—"Hushed gleaming fields and pendant seething wheat/ Of knowledge"—is thus as harrowing as any invoked apocalypse:

And kingdoms
naked in the
trembling heart—
Te Deum laudamus
O Thou Hand of Fire

Columbus, his voyage itself a bridge flung out across space and time, is made to speak here for every passionate discoverer and bridge-maker, not least of course for the poet himself in his imaginative adventuring.

The longest numbered section, "Powhatan's Daughter," now follows. Designed, so Crane told Waldo Frank, to serve his poem as a "basic center and antecedent of all motion" (August 3, 1926), its five subsections fill out nearly a third of The Bridge's printed text. More than elsewhere we seem to follow a narrative though not a chronological sequence, an impression sharpened by the running series of marginal glosses subjoined to this but (except for a single notation at the start of "Ave Maria") to no other part of the poem. The Indian princess Pocahontas, in Crane's synopsis to Otto Kahn, stands for the "physical body of the continent" and is the matrix of life and potentiality to be explored and, ideally, reawakened in every event this long section recovers and celebrates. As such she is apparently one with the unnamed "she" of the glosses: the "woman with us in the dawn," the woman whose "chieftain lover" still "haunts the lakes and hills." Hers is the "body under the wide rain" known to the continental drifters of "The River" and to the poet himself in his journeying, and she is the grieving bride in the ritual exorcism of temporality and death re-enacted in "The Dance"—"on the pure mythical and smoky soil at last," as Crane explained things to Kahn.

"Powhatan's Daughter" begins, however, with two poems drawing us back into the contemporary city scene. Against a confused early morning medley of dockside and harbor noise—"a tide of voices," "a drunken stevedore's howl and thud," "soft sleeves of sound," "signals dispersed in veils"—the second-person protagonist of "The Harbor Dawn" lies with an unnamed lover, watched over (the gloss tells us) by a woman-figure's ghostly presence.¹⁶ Then in "Van Winkle" fragments of a disorienting metropolitan day are played off against the childhood remembrances stirred up by a handorgan's casual drone—schoolroom lessons about story-book heroes, backyard games edging into scariness, a father's punishment, a mother's tantalizingly withdrawn smile. These two lyric cameos make self-contained interludes within the longer poem; neither seems essential to its advancing structure. But each brings forward the same abstract oppositions—of near and remote, center and circumference, private feeling and the historical world's collective intrusions—that play across The Bridge as a whole. Each hints at continental expansions (the last dawn star beckons the lovers of "The Harbor Dawn" to some western hill, the macadam pavements of "Van Winkle" stretch in fact to the Golden Gate); each advances formally by the same kaleidoscope rhythm of notation, the same quickened sequence of dissolves from one evocative phrasing to the next. Together these sections compose a double overture to the panoramic design of "The River," the staccato opening lines of which follow directly from the accelerated beat and excited verbs ("Keep hold," "Have you got," "hurry along") of "Van Winkle's closing stanza.

Beyond question "The River" is the showpiece of "Powhatan's Daughter," if not of the poem as a whole. Crane himself wrote, at the moment of finishing it, "I think I have worked harder and longer on this section of The Bridge than any other" (July 4, 1927). To Winters, the next day, he summed up its organizing intention, which was "to tell the pioneer experience backward"; that is, to re-create from the perspective of the present the full succession of the North American continent's life-in-history. Accordingly this section moves from the commercialized "wilderness of freight and rails" that 1920s hoboes now wanderacross, the contemporary landscape of advertising billboards and telegraph wires stringing "town to town and dream to ticking dream," back to earlier epochs of "axe and powder horn," vanished Indian dynasties, and—still deeper in aboriginal time, or timelessness—the vast processes of geologic accumulation from which everything else in the continent's evolving life takes its rise:

Damp tonnage and alluvial march of days—
Nights turbid, vascular with silted shale
And roots surrendered down of moraine clays:
The Mississippi drinks the farthest dale.
O quarrying passion, undertowed sunlight! . . .

There are too many comparable expressive figurings in "The River" to do justice to in a summary account. Repeatedly single lines or line pairings bring theme and occasion into precise idiomatic focus; so the poem's temporal counterpointing of short-run agitations and long slow unfoldings is neatly caught up in a description of men who "take their liquor slow—and count / . . . The river's minute by the far brook's year." The cumulative power of this section is twofold. In part it is in the hieroglyphic scenepainting—inscribed slogans, place-names of rivers and railroad stops, mythologic presences underground—and in the names, acts, and chanted songs of those whose childlike "bird-wit" penetrates to elemental meanings:

Time's rendings, time's blendings they construe
As final reckonings of fire and snow. . . .

Lost to any comfortably organized or purposeful future ("Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods"), it is these derelict wanderers who nevertheless "touch something like a key perhaps":

—They know a body under the wide rain.

They also know sudden death: a stanza that Winters at his dourest continued to find affecting gives us, in the two lines evoking the railroad hobo "Dan Midland—jolted from the cold brake-beam," a figure as memorable in his fugitive appearance as Moby-Dick's Bulkington.¹⁷But equally the power of "The River" develops through its graduated cadences and rhythms, above all in the movement through the middle part of it from slow-paced pentameter stanzas of eight to ten firmly rhymed lines (with one stanza of double length) into the full solemnity of its eight closing quatrains. These, rhymed throughout in heavy long-voweled monosyllables, re-enact the great river's heraldic passage (carrying with it the lives of all who live in its wide basin) downward into the receiving and answering ocean:

And flows within itself, heaps itself free.
All fades but one thin skyline "round . . . Ahead
No embrace opens but the stinging sea;
The River lifts itself from its long bed,

Poised wholly on its dream, a mustard glow
Tortured with history, its one will—flow!
—The Passion spreads in wide tongues, choked
and slow,
Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below.

Intimations midway in "The River" of what Crane identified to Otto Kahn as "the primal world of the Indian" (September 12, 1927) now open out into the re-created tribal ritual and frenzy of "The Dance." Here a structure of continuous narrative encloses the descriptive fantastications meant to enact a metamorphic reconvergence of the white and red races and through this a reconciliation with the physical continent's dangerously autochthonous powers. "Grey tepees tufting the blue knolls ahead, / Smoke swirling through the yellow chestnut glade . . . / A distant cloud, a thunder-bud—it grew, / That blanket of the skies: the padded foot / Within,—I heard it; 'til its rhythm drew,/—Siphoned the black pool from the heart's hot root!": though prosodically "The Dance"continues with the pentameter quatrains used for the measured close of "The River," an audibly different syntax and voicing give it what Crane especially wanted for it, a contrasted rhythm of its own—"a rapid foot-beat," he explained to Yvor Winters (July 5, 1927).

Appropriately, in this context, The Bridge's symbolism of eagle and serpent—soaring conquests of space and the unappeasable bite of time—comes front and center in "The Dance" and remains to complete the shift, once more, to prayer and resolution in its closing lines:

The serpent with the eagle in the boughs.

Only, perhaps, an element of artificiality not in the Indian fiction itself but in its staged development qualifies admiration. Details of the central episode seem a touch too schematic, its symbolic furnishing too methodically inscribed. But if "The Dance" risks factitiousness, it is not in the way both Winters and Allen Tate asserted in fastening on one line in particular as clear evidence of Crane's imaginative confusion (or false faith). This is the line concluding a stanza spoken directly by the poem's entranced protagonist to his Indian counterpart: "Lie to us,—dance us back the tribal morn!" Surely this is to be understood as rising out of the dramatized frenzy of the narrative moment rather than as (so Winters described it in reviewing The Bridge) a desperate maneuver to compensate for "the inadequacy of [Crane's own] belief." Crane, in his reply, made a last attempt to straighten matters out and to remind Winters that dramatic poetry especially is, after all, a fabrication in appropriate words of imaginable states and conditions of consciousness. "All I am saying," Crane wrote back about the line in question, "amounts in substance to this: "Mimic the scene of yesterday; I want to see how it looked' (June 4, 1930).¹⁸

The Indian material may nevertheless be the element in The Bridge's basic program requiring the greatest, or least rewarding, suspension of disbelief. In the text of "Indiana" (one of the three sections not written out until late in 1929, it completes "Powhatan's Daughter") the one passage that does seem misconceived is a four-stanza interpolation in which the bereft pioneer woman who speaks, or sings, this poem remembers a speechless exchange of glances with an Indian mother along the trail back from the delusions of the Gold Rush:

.. . I suddenly the bolder
Knew that mere words could not have brought us
nearer.
She nodded—and that smile across her shoulder
Will still endear her .. .

Knowing that this interpolation was meant to continue the Pocahontas symbolism and its "absorption into "our contemporary veins' (as Crane told Harry and Caresse Crosby: October 29, 1929) is no great help in getting through it. Yet in gauging Crane's working intentions with "Indiana" some credit should be allowed the poem's singular verse form. As already noted, its rhymed quatrains—second and fourth lines indented and the fourth elliptically shortened—appear on the page as an adaptation of the regular balladnarrative stanza, and the poem itself follows a ballad or folksong scenario. The woman speaker, her husband long dead from his own disappointed wandering, grieves at the absence in turn of her son; old now, she remembers past events and at the end pleads for his return home.

It is an archetypal story—Frost's "The Black Cottage" offers another version of it—and though so far as I know no particular precedent has been suggested as Crane's model or source, it remains as alive as ever to popular consciousness.¹⁹ As, again, briefly in "Cutty Sark" and in the third of the "Three Songs"—

O rain at seven,
Pay-check at eleven—
Keep smiling the boss away . ..

—borrowing popular song-forms would seem to have an appropriate place inCrane's effort after the widest possible "scope of implication" (in a key phrase from the essay "Modern Poetry"). Demonstrating correspondences with popular tradition does not of itself salvage an ill-written performance—to cite Ezra Pound's stern rule in ABC of Reading: "When the writing is masterly one does NOT have to excuse it or to hunt up the reason for perpetuating the flaw"—and "Indiana" does show a more than usual, or more than usually unrevised, improvisation and haste. But the Indian-woman episode apart, the pioneer mother's complaint is effective enough in crossing tiredness and resignation with strokes of bitter wit—

We found God lavish there in Colorado
But passing sly.

—and its direct closing appeal for her boy's return structurally anticipates the reversed appeal, the poet's appeal to his spiritual predecessor Whitman, which will end the long "Cape Hatteras" section, soon to follow.

5

"Cutty Sark," the next numbered section of The Bridge, repeats the progression backward in time from present disorders to the heraldry of a heroic past, represented here (as Crane described the poem in his September 1927 letter to Otto Kahn) in a "regatta of phantom clipperships seen from Brooklyn Bridge." The burned-out sailor whose reminiscences, delivered to banal piano accompaniment, dispatch the poet-speaker into the city night and his bridge walk home derives from more than one literary source. Melville's derelict sea-wanderers, Baudelaire's matelot ivrogne, characters in Eugene O'Neill's sea plays for the Provincetown Players have been suggested, and Crane himself, delighted with his newly drafted poem, dropped an allusion to "Herr Freud" in identifying this uncanny interlocutor as "an old man of the sea" (July 29, 1926). Only a little longer than "The Harbor Dawn" and "Van Winkle," "Cutty Sark," too, takes its place in The Bridge as a self-contained interlude, though correspondences with other sections are easy enough to spot in its phrasing and imagery. Possibly this is why Yvor Winters exempted it from the general charge of chaos and failure. An "almost incomparably skillful dance of shadows," Winters called it, for once as fulsomely approving in 1930 as he seems to have been on first reading this and other sections of The Bridge three and a half years before.

Winter's comparable praise of "Southern Cross"—to look past "Cape Hatteras" for a moment to the mid-ocean phantasmagoria of this first of the "Three Songs"—may again reflect its relative independence of other sections. (The kinesthetically vigorous satire of "National Winter Garden," second in this group, Winters spoke of as only a further instance of Crane's "faults of rhetoric") Both individually and as a numbered section the "Three Songs" are incidental to The Bridge's main advance but complement its working dialectic of interwoven contraries. These short poems are addressed in succession to the feminine archetypes given their ultimate names early in "Southern Cross" ("Eve! Magdalene! / or Mary, you?") and call forth, particularly the first and second, both preternatural threats and terrors and the irrepressible resurgence of human desiring—for spiritual transcendence, for the actual consummations of bone and flesh. The third and slightest, "Virginia," is merely—but thoroughly—charming, finding its "blue-eyed Mary" in a dime-store tower (the Woolworth "cathedral," as commonly identified in the 1910s and 1920s) high above springtime flower vendors, "[c]rap-shooting gangs," and Eliotesque "oyster shells" in the downtown streets.

"Cape Hatteras," its more than two hundred lines making it nearly as long as the whole of "The Sleepers," is a different affair altogether, composing both the compositional center of The Bridge and its most argued-over major section. It is another of those that Crane completed only in the final rush to publication in 1929. In several ways it seems marked by haste and expressive forcing—in its turbulent language and stretched-out lines, its noisy simulations of industrial and martial violence, its contraction at intervals into sheer percussiveness:

Power's script,—wound, bobbin-bound, refined—
Is stropped to the slap of belts on booming spools,
spurred
Into the bulging bouillon, harnessed jelly of the
stars.
Towards what? The forked crash of split thunder
parts
Our hearing momentwise.. . .

Something of what R. P. Blackmur, writing about the problems of judgment posed by Yeats's later practice, shrewdly called "ad libbing"—when "the artist poaches most on his resources," his stock and manner of performative contrivance—comes into "Cape Hatteras" with particular prominence. Yet the main scheme is solid and clear. From the perspective (introducing, again, a geologic framing) of that point on the continent's margin from which early in our century the first airship took off, this section's alternating "we" and "I" look out across the full expanse of time and space that has precipitated the world we know, above all the world of 1914-1918, and in what was planned from the start as "a kind of ode to Whitman" (September 12, 1927) the question is asked: Is our collective future what yours was, Walt, when you sang on through the massacres of that earlier war? Successive long stanzas of "Cape Hatteras" enact the modern forms of blinding, death-dealing human motion: in the sky, in industrial plants, in the armed battle fleets now set loose in the air and on the sea. The long closing appeal to Whitman—which incidentally produces one antithetical sixteen-line cadenza ("Cowslip and shadblow . . .") that strikes me as remarkably foreshadowing, even with its two extra lines, the irregular "sonnet" structure Robert Lowell would devise for the poetry of Note-book and History—ends with a fine resolving simplicity in a final typographically divided four-stress line gesture:

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

In his anxiety to "get the 5-year load of The Bridge off my shoulders" ("You can't imagine how insufferably ponderous it has seemed, yes, more than once": October 29, 1929), Crane was sensitive to the danger of some final botch. But in sending off a last revised segment of "Quaker Hill," the poem's sixth numbered section, he was more dismissive than the case requires. "[It] is not, after all," he wrote in a covering letter, "one of the major sections of the poem; it is rather by way of an "accent mark' that it is valuable at all" (December 26, 1929). "Quaker Hill" is more substantial than that. Its compact succession of rhymed octaves draws out (with a caricaturing humor not quite overdone in its detail of proper names; an actual Mrs. Powitzki had been a Patterson, New York neighbor of Crane's) the ironic contrasts of past and present on a patch of historic ground now thoroughly suburbanized. Within this enclave of golf courses, antique-hunting, and real estate deals only the poet still sees, behind everything, "death's stare in slow survey." The legacy of the vanished Quakers, and of clashing Iroquois and Yankee, remains only in the whippoorwill's note of pain, though two embattled artists, the poet Emily Dickinson and the dancer Isadora Duncan, are remembered in the closing stanza as having known such meanings. The observing poet's own stake in the matter is caught up in directly autobiographical lines that condense a lifetime's private torment. I must, he writes—

Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,
Wait for the postman driving from Birch Hill
With birthright by blackmail...

—a turn into self-dramatization that carries across the elegiac close of "Quaker Hill" to the full-scale encounter of "The Tunnel," the staged journey through an underworld of brokenness and death that now follows and that antithetically clears the way to The Bridge's rhapsodic climax in "Atlantis."

"The Tunnel" owes not a little of its shadow play of metropolitan dissonance anddisorder to the precedent of "The Waste Land."²⁰ Language and figured allusion together cue us to this section's manner of unfolding. Its opening words are explicit about what is to be presented:

Performances, assortments, résumés—
Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights
Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,
Refractions of the thousand theatres, faces—
Mysterious kitchens. . . . You shall search them
all.

As if speaking to some other self that is also his own inmost being, the poet's scene-setting voice warns of nightmarish entrapments, in "interborough fissures of the mind" or simply in an entryway's revolving door—

Where boxed alone a second, eyes take fright

—it transmits fragments of mindless subway chatter that are crystallized in time by sheer repetition—

".. . it's half past six she said—if
you don't like my gate why did you
swing on it, why didja
swing on it
anyhow—"

—and, in a resumption of the basic pentameter cadence, it summons up yet one more ghostly forebear from past history, the death-haunted visage of Poe:

Your eyes like agate lanterns—on and on
Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads. .. .

Poetically "The Tunnel" is up and down, offering both brilliantly particular snapshots of city demoralization ("love" reduced here to a "burnt match skating in a urinal") and the turgidness of one late stanza of panicked exclamation ("Daemon . . . / O cruelly to inoculate the brinking dawn / With antennae toward worlds . . . ," etc.) before returning its protagonist, "like Lazarus," to open air and the miraculously recovered promise of the bridge-vision itself:

—A sound of waters bending astride the sky
Unceasing with some Word that will not die .. . !

Once more the poem's furthest projections are secured by a preliminary concreteness of notation; so the closing appeal to some ingathering "Hand of Fire" (the poem's "Daemon" transformed?) develops metaphorically from coasting lights and a tugboat's "steam" and "galvanic blare" in the lines just preceding.

"Atlantis," the final section of The Bridge though the first to have been drafted, was in Crane's mind all along as his point of arrival. More or less from the start this section was planned (in the words of his March 1926 outline to Otto Kahn) as "a sweeping dithyramb in which the Bridge becomes the symbol of consciousness spanning time and space." Add to this formulation the theme of love in its Dantesque power of reconciliation and renewal, and we have the interior climax of the eighth of its irregularly rhymed octaves, in the opening phrase of which the bridge receives—among all the other names now chanted out: "Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage," "Choir," "Psalm of Cathay," love's "Paradigm," "intrinsic myth," "Deity's glittering Pledge," "Flower," "Answerer," "Anemone," "Everpresence," "Song"—that one name ("steeled Cognizance") that rises directly from its erected structure:

O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark's return;

Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain,—
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time's
realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm.²¹

In the apprehension Crane means at this climax to impose, there is no opposition finally between knowledge and love, or between human enterprise and the forms of the created world—both of them double, both harboring the hope of an ultimate reconvergence.

Except in the upward thrust of its prepositions and adverbs—"Through the bound cable strands," "Up the index of night," "And on, obliquely up . . . ," "Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle / White tempest nets file upward . . ."—"Atlantis" develops no forwarding action other than the poet's own lyric repetitions of prayer and praise. Its metaphoric complication has one fixed theme and is all to one end, a final concentrated celebration of the bridge presence itself as benedictory icon of all human striving:

. . . iridescently upborne
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins

Journeys go off from it to new consummations ("We left the haven hanging in the night—"); eyes that open to its full luminousness must accept the stinging pain and severing violence ("blade on tendon blade") that always for Crane are inseparable from fulfillment; but the bridge itself remains "beyond time," its changeless arc "synoptic of all tides below," its "antiphonal" song justifying ("in azure swing") the historical world's self-renewing torment.

Planning as late as March of 1926 to make Columbus's soliloquy The Bridge's opening section, Crane seems to have considered giving this paired finale the title "Cathay," and "Cathay" remains a primary name in the "Atlantis" section for the prophetically restored cities—their "white escarpments swinging into light"—which will be the issue of the bridge's rainbow covenant. Even the draft sent to Waldo Frank on August 3, 1926, though the accompanying letter calls it "Atlantis," nowhere uses the name itself; this late draft lacks the entire penultimate stanza in which, in the published text, the word "Atlantis" is finally sounded. But at the start of that Isle of Pines summer Crane had reported to Patterson friends his excitement over Lewis Spence's Atlantis in America, a book ("the last .. . out on the subject": May 22, 1926) which The Criterion had reviewed in its January 1926 number; and the Blakean myth of a city-state of timeless artistry and wisdom reborn from ocean chaos seems in due course to have struck him as nearer his poem's imaginative grounding than the Columbian legend of great riches hidden away in remote regions of the earth. At any rate, in this penultimate stanza whose addition completed the poem we now read, it is to an Atlantidean avatar of the bridge that the poet's own covenanting prayer goes up:

Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!

Are we to think of it as after all "too impossible an ambition," as in a first exuberant outlining of "this Bridge thing" (February 18, 1923) Crane conceded to Gorham Munson that it might prove to be? No more so, I would say, than of any other imaginative venture strong enough to create for its readers as it moves forward an ideal conception of some "absolute" fulfillment, to use the heuristic word Crane himself risked deploying in "General Aims and Theories." What is not seriously in question is The Bridge's demonstrated power to impose its singularly contrived expressiveness on our own sense of, at once—so far as we remain concerned with either matter—the continuing possibilities of poetry and the continuing task of recovering a measure of humane control over our common, our revolutionary, history. Not less than, say, Yeats's Byzantium poems and indeed the whole body of Yeats's work involved with the fantastications of A Vision, Crane's poem fixes itself in consciousness both through the figurative authority of its master image and through the surprising fitness and force—the delivered eloquence—of, again and again, individual lines and stanzas, beginnings and endings, self-confirming phrase cadences and a fresh renaming and reordering of recognizable experience. Poetry's value to us is, at best, only exemplary orvirtual. The one trustworthy measure of its success is whether we do or do not discover its achieved forms to have become an available and availing part of our own language-framed apprehension of things, our living collaborations of insight and judgment. The test with Hart Crane is simply to find out, in coming to know his work, whether some such consequence does actually follow.

NOTES

¹ The classifying phrase comes by way of Crane's concern, in replying to Yvor Winters's disparaging review, to detach his poem from the genre of epic and from useless comparisons with Homer, Dante, and Virgil. Though Crane is engaged here in special pleading, his counterarguments strike home. Winters had, once more, allowed "notions about the author's personality to blur the text"; he was now bound on a course shaped by considerations outside the distinctive province of poetry. For Crane's reply see Vivian H. Pemberton, "Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, Rebuttal and Review: A New Crane Letter," American Literature, May 1978, 276-81; reprinted, with the review itself, in Critical Essays on Hart Crane, ed. David R. Clark (1982), 102-14.

² "Hart Crane," in On the Limits of Poetry (1948), 225-37.

³ Similarly it was to the author of Our America that, with his poem surging ahead, Crane wrote on August 19, 1926, of his excitement at realizing concretely "how much of the past is living [in the present] under only slightly altered form, even in machinery and such-like."

⁴ A "little unconscious calligramme on the mango tree" sent to Waldo Frank on May 22, 1926, was the one new poem Crane managed to write during his first fortnight on Isle of Pines. Whether it is identical with the poem mentioned to Winters, or with the irregular prose poem printed under the same title in transition in 1929 and posthumously in the Key West group, is uncertain.

Crane's synopsis of "Calgary Express," as planned, is given in Brom Weber's biography (p. 261).

⁵ Once Crane's ambitions for The Bridge were at last being realized, his comments shifted to, among other concerns, the danger of following too strictly determined a scheme. Writing to Winters, who, though praising the sections Crane had sent him, was already worrying about the poem's over-all unity and logical coherence, Crane responded defensively: "The logical progression of the Bridge is well in my mind. But one has to fight even that. At least one has to be ready to doubt its validity thoroughly" at every fresh return of imaginative "temperature" or "fusion" (March 19, 1927).

⁶ Interestingly, in writing this not to Waldo Frank but to Wilbur Underwood, the confidant of his private doings, Crane's definition of "my material" is not "this myth of America" but ""human nature' or what you will."

⁷ As Sherman Paul notes, however, Williams's Columbus chapter—most of it presented, like "Ave Maria," in Columbus's voice—had appeared in Broom in March 1923, where Crane is not likely to have missed it. Its closing prayer, addressed to the Mother of God, conceivably influenced Crane's choice of title. Also, besides the presence in both In the American Grain and The Bridge of figures like Poe, De Soto, and the vaudeville clown Bert Williams, there is the prose epigraph to "Powhatan's Daughter"—a historical text (by William Strachey, on the colonization of Virginia) either lifted directly from William's "May-pole at Merrymount" chapter or transcribed from Kay Boyle's review of Williams's book in transition, April 1927.

⁸ Untitled in 1855, "The Sleepers" was called "Night Poem" in the 1856 expansion of Leaves of Grass and in 1860 "Sleep-Chasings," when it was pushed back to the end of an again much enlarged collection. Under its final title it remains hidden away in the supplementary final third of the bulky post-1870 pritings of Leaves of Grass. But interestingly, as regards The Bridge, it is placed just after the poems "Passage to India" and "Prayer of Columbus."

⁹ The passage may give us as good a way as any of glossing Crane's remark, in "Modern Poetry," that in Whitman is to be found the best expression of the "American psychosis," the permanent intractability of the forces determining our national existence. Whether or not Crane took special note of "The Sleepers" he knew that Whitman's legacy was something more than an uncritical public boosterism, and temperately suggested to Allen Tate, who shared Winters's prejudice against Whitman, that he read the explicit attack in Democratic Vistas on those American characteristics ("materialism, industrialism, etc.") "of which you name him the guilty and hysterical spokesman" (July 13, 1930).

¹⁰ R. P. Blackmur, in 1935, oddly considered it a self-evident mark of "failure" that The Bridge compels readers to "supply from outside the poem, and with the help of clues only," a "controlling" part of its meaning. So far had principled commentary, in the formative years of the New Criticism, absorbed the modernist telos of an absolute creative autonomy. But in the real transactions of literary history what accessible poem does otherwise? The matter is simply that the reader, too, becomes a contributing maker of the poem's presumptive significance. Blackmur himself, writing soon after about Yeats's final phase, put it down as the plainest of critical truths that all poetry "must be conceived as the manipulation of conventions that the reader will, or will not, take for granted," however the poet's "mastery of language" may have transformed these conventionalized formulations and meanings. See "New Thresholds, New Anatomies: Notes on a Text of Hart Crane" (1935) and "The Later Poetry of W. B. Yeats" (1936), in Form and Value in Modern Poetry (1957).

¹¹ABC of Reading (1934), 46.

¹² But the amplitude and variousness of expression and imputed action in The Bridge do have their cumulative effect, an effect only increased in the perspective of later poetic history. "Judged by the standards of epic greatness," A. Alvarez bluntly declared in 1957, "[Crane's] failure is not in doubt," but in the next breath he was obliged to acknowledge—against, specifically, the undoubted "wit and temperance" of the later Wallace Stevens—the "more vivid range of experience" in Crane's writing (The Shaping Spirit, 110). And David Perkins, closing his comprehensive history of modern poetry in English with a generous appreciation of James Merrill's Sandover triology (a work establishing Merrill as "one of the most moving, imaginative, and ambitious of living poets"), matter-of-factly notes for comparison not only the superior "intensity" of The Bridge but the distinctively "wide and various" world Crane's poem persuasively unfolds (Ë History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After [1987], 659).

¹³ With an eye on the same structural features Mutlu Konuk Biasing, composing a "typology of the generic rhetorics of American poetry," speaks of "the diacritical interplay of fusion and diffusion" in Crane's lyric art and of The Bridge's extension of this interplay to include historical time: American Poetry: The Rhetoric of its Forms (1987), 188-89.

¹⁴The Dial, never without skepticism in dealing with Crane, accepted this section at once for its June 1927 issue.

To be entirely accurate, The Bridge as a whole opens, following its title page and a grateful dedication to Otto Kahn, with an epigraph from an understated verse in the Book of Job: "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it." Sherman Paul, virtually alone in commenting on this, notes its fitness—it is Satan's brazen answer to God's question, Whence comest thou?—to the world of experience the poem consistently discloses.

¹⁵ A reading preoccupied with archetypes and universals can make much of the sequence prophet, pariah, and lover. Harold Bloom, translating directly into allegory, identifies these with Dionysus, Ananke, and Eros—"the full triad of the Orphic destiny": "Introduction," Hart Crane: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (1986), 8.

¹⁶ Except perhaps as a kind of tonal shading the "symbolism of the life and ages of man" that Crane, writing to Otto Kahn, claimed to have woven into this poem's"love-motif" (September 12, 1927) seems unregistered in the descriptive delicacy of its actual language.

¹⁷ Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (1947), 92n.

¹⁸ One line in "The Dance" which, ever since Winters called it "worthy of Racine" and later "one of the purest and most moving lines of our time," has repeatedly been cited as an instance of Crane's genuine mastery may also be an instance of his responsiveness to the best verse cadences in the work of his major contemporaries. Coming at the same frenzied climax, the line in question—"I could not pick the arrows from my side"—exactly reproduces the decisive simplicity of statement that Frost had put at the rhetorical center of "After Apple-Picking" (therefore of all of North of Boston): "I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight."

¹⁹ Two fittingly sentimental versions of the same fable that could be heard half a century after The Bridge are the folksong-like "Sonny's Dream," which Jean Redpath popularized (and could find no author for), and Commander Cody's poignant rap-ballad "Mama Hated Diesels," written by Kevin "Blackie" Farrell. The refrain of "Sonny's Dream," like the whole of "Indiana," is in the woman's own voice: "Sonny, don't go away,/I'm here all alone." It is a song whose intervals, Jean Redpath remarks, "go straight for the tear ducts." The narrative in "Mama Hated Diesels" is delivered instead by the son, standing alone with the preacher by his mother's grave and telling the forlorn tale of how in time she lost both husband and son to the romance, trucker's version, of the open American road.

In Crane's fullest description of The Bridge (September 12. 1927) "Indiana," not yet written, was projected as the monologue of a farmer failed in the Gold Rush and saying farewell to his departing son, but with the dead mother's part in the story carrying its own symbolic import.

²⁰ Eliot's continuing interest in dramatic immediacy and demotic speech may well have been the particular spur to his accepting "The Tunnel" for The Criterion. During 1926 and 1927 he was publishing in Criterion his own dramatized "Sweeney" fragments.

²¹ In the virtually complete draft of "Atlantis" sent to Waldo Frank on August 3, 1926, this stanza opens: "O Thou, carved cognizance. . . . " The shift to "steeled" is, all in all, an extraordinarily advantageous improvement. So, too, was omitting the comma after "Thou."