The Work:
A serious student of poetry during the 1920’s, Hart Crane saw himself as one whose poetry would celebrate rather than denigrate the modern experience. His was to be a poetry of hope in the future and in the poet’s ability to transcend shortcomings. He sought to counteract the cultural despair that was typified, particularly, in T. S. Eliot’s influential The Waste Land (1922), a poem that Crane described as “good, but so damned dead.”
Crane consciously intended The Bridge to provide an antidote to the spiritual despair of modern life by holding up to its readers, as the emblem of the modern world’s own inspiriting accomplishments, John Augustus Roebling’s great technical achievement, the Brooklyn Bridge, which was completed in 1883. Crane had first essayed the long poem form in the three-part “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” (1923), which utilizes jazz rhythms and a wide range of classical, biblical, and historical allusions in its exhortation to his contemporaries to “unbind our throats of fear and pity.”
The initial idea for The Bridge was the direct result of Crane’s insight that the contemporary world was the product, and therefore more likely the fulfillment rather than the negation, of the world’s previous effort toward understanding. By 1924, Crane had, for inspiration, taken up residence in the same Columbia Heights apartment that Roebling had occupied during the bridge’s construction. By then, too, Crane’s circle of literary friends, among them fellow poets and critics Gorham Munson, Waldo Frank, and Allen Tate, anticipated the completion of Crane’s great modernist epic with much the same excitement as he continuously shared its progress with them.
A sudden spurt of productivity occurred when the banker and art patron Otto Kahn advanced Crane one thousand dollars, with the promise of an additional one thousand dollars, so that he might leave his job as an advertising copywriter to devote his full attention to The Bridge. During the summer of 1926, on the Isle of Pines, off Cuba, Crane composed nearly half of the fifteen individual pieces that constitute the completed poem, including, along with the first three sections, “Cutty Sark,” “Three Songs,” and the final section, “Atlantis”—in sum, much of the poem’s most lyrical passages as well as its visionary heart.
The work then became bogged down as a result of Crane’s philosophical doubts after his having read Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918, 1922; The Decline of the West, 1926, 1928). Crane joined the American expatriate scene in Paris from December, 1928, to July, 1929, but rather than the experience serving as a source of renewed inspiration, he gained a considerable notoriety by indulging in assorted debaucheries. Back in New York, he finally completed The Bridge, which was published in a limited edition in Paris by the Black Sun Press in January, 1930, and by Liveright in New York in March.
The finished work might appear at first to be no more than a series of loosely connected individual poems, disparate in tone, voice, and style from one another. In fact, however, The Bridge is orchestrated much like a symphony, in which a progressive series of interrelated lyrics creates a narrative sequence that achieves greater intensity of vision as history and common experience give way to the mythic quest for an overarching identity and purpose—hence Crane’s ruling metaphor of a bridge.
In the opening poem “To Brooklyn Bridge,” the reader begins at the foot of that noteworthy structure in Manhattan, from there to be transported, in vision, back in time to the deck of the Santa Maria as Columbus, unbeknown even to himself, approaches the discovery of a new world.
The hero and speaker of The Bridge identifies openly with a “bedlamite” who “speeds to thy parapets,” the only difference being that the hero knows that he must not make any literal leap but wait for the visionary moment to descend. The madman and the poet are the same, nevertheless, in spirit. Both recognize, as Columbus, yet another visionary, does in the poem’s next section, “Ave Maria,” that there will always be “still one shore beyond desire.”
Part 2, “Powhatan’s Daughter,” a section composed of five individual poems, duplicates the poem’s structure thus far by beginning again in a contemporary setting in “Harbor Dawn” but then moving back through time, locating literary and other historical landmarks. “Van Winkle” returns to the earlier New Amsterdam of the original Dutch settlers. “The River” takes the reader into the heartland of the continent in a collage of nineteenth century American folklore. “The Dance” recalls the Native American culture embodied in Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas of Jamestown. She and John Smith become an American Helen and Faustus, the representative wedding of European yearnings with a native Indian wisdom. “Indiana,” the closing poem of part 2, sends their spiritual descendant, young Larry, the son of pioneers, off to sea. America returns its new spirit to the Old World.
Part 3, “Cutty Sark,” characterizes this uniquely American contribution as the settlers’ capacity to subdue not only nature by mastering a continent but also time and space. This section celebrates the speedy clipper ships by which the early settlers’ descendants spread American commerce, and so the pervading influences of American culture, everywhere. The seagoing “bridge” formed by those vessels takes to the air in part 4, “Cape Hatteras,” an appropriate venue since it is not only a hazard for shipping but also the locale from which Wilbur and Orville Wright’s heavier-than-air vessel took off in 1903.
In part 5, “Three Songs,” there is a momentary lyric interlude in praise of the female, left behind in the closing section of “Powhatan’s Daughter.” Venus, Eve, and Magdalen, she is ultimately reincarnated in “Virginia” in both the fated Indian princess Pocahontas and the Judeo-Christian tradition’s Mary.
A sort of quiescent domesticity is established as the energies that tamed a continent subside, and so part 6, “Quaker Hill,” conveys, as the name implies (although the ghosts of Emily Dickinson and Isadora Duncan inhabit its pages), the placid suburban neatness of middle-class America. That surface quiet is deceptive, however, and part 7, “The Tunnel,” is part 6’s necessary companion piece, a descent, via the New York subway, into the sprawling urban nightmare that has also become, by Crane’s time, another part of the American experience. There the reader meets another ghost from America’s literary and mythic past, Edgar Allan Poe.
Naturally, this darkest hour is just before the visionary dawn, and this subway ride, for all its urban squalor and inchoate terror, stops in the Battery at the Brooklyn Bridge, site of Walt Whitman’s old Brooklyn Ferry, and part 8, “Atlantis,” concludes where the epic hero began, by rising out of the darkness of the urban nightmare into the bright nightlife of a modern city enlightened by the sight of the Brooklyn Bridge: “Through the bound cable strands, the arching path/ Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings. . . .” The hero-speaker has arrived back where he started, immeasurably wiser for the experience of spiritually living his nation’s becoming. He hopes to see the fulfillment of the old European dream of Atlantis, the perfected human community. Columbus had, after all, sought a better world. The poet has already told the reader that there will always be that one shore beyond desire, and so the hero can only wonder if he has indeed reached the vision’s source.
This concludes Crane’s The Bridge, and there is perhaps no more sustained or ambitious a lyric undertaking from Crane’s time. The Bridge has, nevertheless, generally been received as a flawed epic, grander in the scope of its design and of its central metaphor of America as the dynamic bridge between the past and the future than in the fulfillment of its execution. Crane later would comment, “So many true things have a way of coming out all the better without the strain to sum up the universe in one impressive little pellet.”
Crane, committed to the visionary aspects of poetry, settled on an apotheosis of the American experience as a theme equal to his talents and ambitions. What Crane accomplishes, however, rather than a vision of America, is a vision of the poet as the dreamer who will not give up his dream, even if its realization is private or obscure. It is Crane’s hero’s recognition of these vulnerabilities, of the fact that he lets the world make a fool out of him, that realizes his heroism.
Crane apparently committed suicide by leaping into the Atlantic Ocean somewhere north of Cuba on April 24, 1932. Although he was only thirty-two, he thought himself a failure and a has-been. His poetic achievement fell far short of his aims, but his aims for his masterwork, The Bridge, were quite lofty. Its poetry continues to echo in the American experience.