Professor Langdon
Hammer: The Bridge.
In order to get to The
Bridge I want to go back and
just say a few more things about
"Voyages" and about Crane in
general.
In Crane's letter to the
distressed editor of
Poetry magazine,
Harriet Monroe – that prose
selection included in the back
of your book – Crane defends
his poem "At Melville's Tomb"
and specifically defends what he
calls his "recourse to the logic
of metaphor."
What does "the logic of
metaphor" mean for Crane?
 
Well, he distinguishes his
criteria from Monroe's,
on page 968.
He says:
My poem may well be
elliptical and actually
obscure..
but in your criticism… you
have stated your objections in
terms that allow me… the
privilege of claiming your ideas
and ideals as theoretically,
at least, quite outside the
issues of my own aspirations.
[And he says:]
To put it more plainly,
as a poet I may very possibly
be more interested in the
so-called illogical impingements
of the connotations of… [well,
that's a misprint:
it should be "words"]
on the consciousness (and their
combinations and interplay in
metaphor on this basis),
than I am interested in the
preservation of their logically
rigid significations...
Crane is talking here about
putting a kind of priority in
his poetry on connotation over
denotation.
He's interested in the ways
words relate to and through
other words, before or in
addition to the ways in which
they relate to the things of the
world.
In this sense,
Crane introduces us to a sense
of poetry as a linguistic
environment that is constructed
through words relating among
themselves in ways that play
upon our imagination,
systems of association that in
effect solicit our contribution
to complete the thought,
all of which supposes and seeks
a kind of special intimacy with
us as readers,
and gives us work to do.
I suggested that the sea is a
kind of figure or metaphor in
Crane's work for this linguistic
space: an imaginative space to
which we are summoned.
 
In a poem like "At Melville's
Tomb," he's concerned with
specifically how messages are
transported with,
well, what he calls "the dice
of drowned men's bones."
You can understand the poem as
an elegy for Melville.
It's also about reading
Melville and getting his
message;
that is, reaching back into the
past and becoming,
for Melville,
the kind of reader that Crane
himself seeks as he describes it
in his letter to Monroe.
 
In talking about "Voyages II,"
I suggested that the--or
"Voyages III," rather,
the third section of the
poem--I suggested that the image
of "infinite consanguinity" was
in part an image of this
linguistic mixing and
promiscuity that Crane is
interested in in poetry.
In this poem,
the mixing of words in poetry
is analogized to the mixing of
bodies of lovers.
Love here is also like death
because it's a shattering
experience through which the
self is remade and changed with
and through another.
 
This is a process of
transformation.
It's one that Crane calls
"transmemberment," which is a
way of evoking not so much a
sharing of identity,
but rather some kind of
exchange of it,
which is an experience of the
self changed and the self
redeemed.
In Crane's eyes this is exactly
what The Waste Land
contemplates and draws back
from;
doesn't embrace,
turns away from.
It's what, in Crane,
love promises.
It's what poetry, song promises.
The space of the poem,
which is like,
as Crane imagines it,
a space of love,
is set apart from ordinary
life.
You might contrast the kind of
song and singing that you find
in this poem with Eliot's love
song for Prufrock.
Crane recovers in this poem a
kind of heroic blank verse,
the medium of heroic drama,
and uses it for the speech of a
poet-lover who celebrates the
power of sound to make its own
sense,
through the affirming force of
desire.
He imagines this,
again, as a kind of
resurrection of some kind,
what he talks about as what has
to happen after The Waste
Land.
In this sense,
Crane is talking about some
kind of passage through death,
and you can understand that
death as Crane's admission,
as I suggested last time,
of the illusory nature of
rhetoric, of love itself,
of the power of desire,
which Crane is always realistic
about, you could say.
The poem, "Voyages,"
treats--its theme is really the
triumph of desire,
even in defeat.
That's also the theme of "At
Melville's Tomb," and it's the
grand theme of The
Bridge. The Bridge is
Crane's great poem about
America.
Let me bring up a picture of
him.
This is Crane in 1927 or '28.
 
It's unclear exactly when the
photo was taken by Walker Evans,
a great American photographer
and Crane's friend,
on top of 110 Columbia Heights
where Crane lived,
in view of Manhattan and the
bridge,
the Brooklyn Bridge.
 
The Bridge is Crane's
great poem about America or
about the idea of America,
and I'll say more about what
that means in a moment.
 
And it's a reply,
self-consciously so,
to The Waste Land.
 
I suggested that the shortness
of The Waste Land was in
some ways a kind of argument
against epic in the modern
world,
an argument about the
impossibility of epic vision in
a culture which lacks shared
myths,
shared symbols.
Against this lack Crane
proposes the bridge,
the Brooklyn Bridge,
as a kind of central organizing
symbol for modern culture.
 
This is a picture of the bridge
being built in the nineteenth
century.
It's important that as Crane
looks at the bridge as a modern
symbol, that we remember that it
wasn't built in 1920.
 
I've forgotten now the year in
which it is, but it was at
least, I think,
sixty years old at this point.
And you can see when Roebling's
bridge was first created,
there's no Manhattan skyline
for it to reach to.
When Crane turns to the bridge
as a symbol of the modern,
he's already looking back to an
earlier vision of the modern,
if you like.
And in doing so he is joining
many other American artists.
 
This is a photograph by Walker
Evans, who took many images of
the bridge with its cables and
Gothic arches,
all of which play into Crane's
poems in complex ways.
This is the very great poem,
one of many--or painting by
Joseph Stella that appears in
the Yale Gallery:
a fantastic work,
one that Crane hadn't seen
actually when he began The
Bridge, but which in all
sorts of ways is harmonious with
his vision,
including the ways in which the
sublime vision that it offers
includes darkness and,
I would have to say,
perhaps frightening or sinister
elements.
It is also importantly a moment
in American art when artists
like Stella, like Crane,
are interested--here's John
Marin with another image,
this one painted from the
bridge--in which artists are
creating a kind of idiom that
involves and includes
abstraction,
shows us images of the world in
realist representation that are
being transformed into something
semi-abstract and symbolic.
Crane is very much involved in
the same kind of activity as
these artists.
These are more images from
Evans;
these, of course,
shot from underneath the bridge
and showing it as a kind of
abstract form rising into the
New York skyline.
This is the title page of
Crane's poem as it appeared in
the Black Sun edition,
a limited edition in Paris in
1930, its first publication
followed shortly thereafter by a
publication in New York.
 
Crane took the Brooklyn Bridge
as a kind of symbol of a
structure, the structure of a
spiritual action,
as he understood it,
underpinning American history.
It seemed to him to embody an
idea that he saw variously
embodied in American history.
 
For Crane, American history is
a series of new world visions,
all of them versions or avatars
of what he also calls Atlantis,
the city sunk beneath the waves
in Platonic myth that promises
to return and return us to some
kind of redeemed community.
Atlantis is Crane's name for a
kind of promised relation to the
world that's been glimpsed but
also lost.
To aim at Atlantis,
as the poem does,
and as Crane says American
history does,
is to go interestingly,
confusingly,
simultaneously into the past
and into the future;
to rescue or recover something
from history,
promised for the future;
and to bring that future into
being.
Crane understands the mythic
work of the poem,
his poem, as a kind of active
crossing,
one that has this chronological
mission of going back into the
past and forward into the
future.
The title page here – you
can't make it out,
but it's clear in your
anthology – carries an
epigraph from The Book of Job:
"From going to and fro in the
earth,
/ and from walking up and down
in it."
The epigraph from Job
introduces these two motions as
being essential to Crane's
imagination in the poem;
that is, going to and fro,
back and forth,
and by going up and down.
 
You can see these two motions,
in fact, easily visualizable in
the form of the bridge itself,
which drives its pylons into
the river and rises up in these
Gothic structures in order to
carry people back and forth
across the river.
The epigraph is also a kind of
joke because Crane wrote this
poem, like Job,
tramping around across the
Northeast from one apartment or
house to another,
or one couch to another;
and wrote it in Europe and
California and elsewhere,
himself, Crane,
being without a secure station
in the poem, in the writing of
the poem.
Crane's interest in the poem in
hobos and marginals of many
kinds, as well as with pioneers
and other kinds of travelers,
all represent figures of
spiritual questers who are in a
sense without a station in life
but rather in motion,
as Crane himself was.
This is the table of contents
of the poem.
It's helpful,
I think, to look at it because
it's confusing.
The poem consists in this
proem, which I'll talk about in
a few moments,
where Crane actually dedicates
his long poem,
actually dedicates this poem to
the Brooklyn Bridge – as if
you could dedicate a poem to the
bridge,
to an object;
a first section,
called "Ave Maria," which is
spoken by Columbus – Columbus,
not on his way to the New World
but rather on his way back.
He speaks to us on his way
back, and it introduces the
theme of carrying the message or
the vision forward into the
future.
The question of how to retrieve
or recover the vision of the New
World is initially introduced
there.
Then there's a section called
"Powhatan's Daughter," which
refers to Pocahontas,
invokes a vision of the
American continent through a
series of poems:
"The Harbor Dance,"
"Van Winkle," "The River," "The
Dance," and "Indiana," which all
explore various moments in the
history of the conquering of the
continent.
There's a section called "Cutty
Sark" which introduces us to a
drunken visionary sailor in a
bar on Sand Street in Lower
Manhattan.
That figure seems to
metamorphose into Walt Whitman
in Section IV,
"Cape Hatteras," in a sense the
center of the poem.
 
"Cape Hatteras" is concerned
with the invention of flight,
and it links Whitman to,
really, the whole history of
American invention.
 
There is a series of songs
called "Three Songs";
another section called "Quaker
Hill," evoking a 1920s New York
suburb, really,
or Connecticut Hills,
which brings us up to the
present;
as does the poem,
"The Tunnel"--the tunnel being
that most closely based on
The Waste Land and
describing a kind of infernal
journey through the New York
subways;
and then finally "Atlantis," a
kind of visionary rhapsody that
invokes the object of quest that
the poem is concerned with.
 
The poem in this way charts
various journeys westward and
eastward, back and forth in
time.
Discovery means nothing without
the relaying of the vision,
the carrying it forward.
 
The Bridge is concerned
with, in these various sections,
with a series of symbols,
symbols that are very
frequently vehicles or
transports, from Columbus's ship
to the subway,
to the Wright Brothers'
airplanes.
Transport: this is,
in a sense, the grand theme of
The Bridge.
The root meaning of metaphor is
"to carry something over," to
transport it.
For Crane, metaphor is as
central a concept and activity
as translation is for Pound.
But in Crane the emphasis is on
imaginative transformation.
That's really what metaphor has
to offer.
The central symbol of The
Bridge, the bridge itself,
you could understand as a
metaphor for metaphor;
a metaphor for a primary human
capacity, the capacity to posit
an object of desire – "Frosted
eyes there were that lifted
altars" – to posit an object
of desire that expands the
horizon of the real,
what's possible,
and in so doing violates
existing systems of cognition
and projects the vision of a new
world.
This also means that the poem
is constantly producing new
symbols for this activity,
new metaphors.
Crane said in one letter,
"The bridge in becoming a ship,
a world, a woman,
a tremendous harp,
as it finally does,
seems really to have a career."
And so it does.
This is, again,
the Black Sun edition,
which I recommend that you go
to the Beinecke and look at.
 
It's one of the most beautiful
books I know.
It's a great big book with
these big margins and red
headings.
Let's look at the proem as both
an introduction to the poem and
as a kind of summary,
in miniature,
of its intentions,
claims, procedures:
How many dawns,
chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings
shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of
tumult, building high
Over the chained bay
waters Liberty --
Then, with inviolate curve,
forsake our eyes
 As apparitional as
sails that cross
 Some page of figures to
be filed away;
 --Till elevators drop
us from our day…
The poem begins with another
resurrection of some kind;
in this case,
not a seal rising from the
water to gaze toward paradise,
but rather a seagull rising as
many times before,
"How many dawns,
chill from his rippling
rest."
And this seagull becomes a kind
of image of ascent and flight.
 
I guess it is an initial image
of transport.
The bird sheds "white rings
of tumult" and there's that
word from "Voyages III,"
remember?
"And where death,
if shed, / presumes no carnage,
but this single change..."
 
Here, again,
there's an action of shedding
as the bird throws off the
darkness of the night and rises,
"building high," then
disappears.
The vision vanishes.
 
We are in the world of work,
we are in the office spaces of
Lower Manhattan,"
--Till elevators drop us
from our day…" And if
we've just gone up now,
we go down again:
I think of cinemas,
panoramic sleights
 With multitudes bent
toward some flashing scene
 Never disclosed,
but hastened to again,
 Foretold to other eyes
on the same screen….
The movie theater:
the movie theater is a new
machine of transport in the
twenties,
a kind of mass entertainment
that Crane's poem will,
in a sense, try to rival and
provide a complementary way of
imagining a collective vision.
And what he offers next is the
bridge, which he addresses in
this archaic language –
archaic and intimate language
– as if Brooklyn Bridge could
have a subjectivity:
And Thee [he
says], across the
harbor, silver-paced [as if
the light on the
bridge were being seen as a
kind of movement that the bridge
was itself involved in]
As though the sun took step
of thee, yet left
 Some motion ever
unspent in thy stride,--
 Implicitly thy freedom
staying thee!
This is a wild kind of address
to architecture,
as if the bridge were animate
with the power of motion and as
if it had a kind of motion that
was fountain-like and could not
be exhausted.
Then suddenly,
we're given another vision.
 
 
The threat of suicide suddenly
rises up in the poem:
Out of some subway
scuttle, cell or loft
 A bedlamite speeds to
thy parapets,
 Tilting there momently,
shrill shirt ballooning,
 A jest falls from the
speechless caravan.
The possibility of failure
seems dialectically to be
written into this poem's grand
ambition, its wish for ascent
and redemption.
Crane turns them to images of
the bridge in the New York
skyline:
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.
As if it were a kind of ship.
I don't know about you,
but I am thrilled every time I
read Crane's language for
evoking the kind of sensual
power of New York architecture.
 
O harp and altar,
of the fury fused,
 (How could mere toil
align thy choiring strings!)
[the bridge is harp and
altar--instrument of music and
site of worship]
Terrific threshold of the
prophet's pledge,
 Prayer of pariah,
and the lover's cry,--
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…
O Sleepless as the river
under thee,
 Vaulting the sea,
the prairies' dreaming sod
[suddenly the bridge crosses
the Atlantic,
it crosses the American
continent],
Unto us lowliest sometime
sweep, descend [and now it's
a kind of divinity
that he beseeches to descend]
And of the curveship
[the bridge itself seen as a
kind of vehicle of a
curveship]
lend a myth to
God.
 
 
 
The poem means to incorporate
the threat of failure and the
threat of death and move beyond
it,
much as it aims to incorporate
The Waste Land's despair
and move beyond it.
 
It is a kind of jest,
a kind of prayer,
a kind of pledge that belongs
to lover or pariah;
these are speech acts that are
models for the kind of poem that
you're reading.
The intention is to somehow
create from a series of
fragments a whole that would be
an "unfractioned idiom,"
as Crane calls it,
which would be a kind of pure
and redeemed language.
There's that phrase in the last
stanza, "of the curveship,"
meaning both derived from the
bridge, I think,
and partaking of it.
 
He asks the bridge to lend a
myth to God.
"To lend" is to give knowing it
will be given back.
This is not a permanent name
for God, it is not the one
symbol for God.
It is only one in an ongoing
series of acts of naming,
which are all acts of metaphor,
which are all acts by which
something from the past is
joined to the future –
something far is joined with
something near – out of some
kind of spiritual need or
vision.
Well, the poem was begun –
Crane liked this idea – with
both ends at once just the way
you build a bridge:
by writing the proem and by
writing "Atlantis,"
and gradually over time moving
towards the middle.
 
This is the final section,
"Atlantis."
In fact, why don't we turn
there for a moment.
This is a splendid,
outrageous, Shelleyan lyric
speech:
Through the bound cable
strands, the arching path
Upward, veering with light,
the flight of strings [and you
can image now in
your minds that great Stella
painting over in the gallery],--
Taut miles of shuttling
moonlight syncopate
The whispered rush,
telepathy of wires.
Up the index of night,
granite and steel--
Transparent meshes--fleckless
the gleaming staves--
Sibylline voices flicker,
waveringly stream
As though a god were issue of
the strings….
Here at the end of the poem,
Crane imagines a kind of ascent
through the structure of the
bridge which becomes a grand
musical instrument,
a harp.
The visionary appears here in
fragmentary ways,
as in line 25,
where: "Sheerly the eyes,
like seagulls stung with
rime--/ slit and propelled by
glistening fins of light…"
Crane talks here about the eyes
moving up through this structure
like the seagull that we saw in
the first line of the poem.
 
The object of desire,
the version of paradise Crane
offers us is there in line 42 or
so where he talks about the
bridge as
"Vision-of-the-Voyage":
Bridge,
lifting night to cycloramic [it
should be]
crest
Of deepest day--O Choir,
translating time
Into what multitudinous Verb
the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse
[as if somehow the sun and water
on
the space of the bridge beneath
it created what Crane calls a
"multitudinous Verb"], recast
In myriad syllables,--Psalm of
Cathay!
[That's of course Columbus's
goal, Cathay.]
O Love, thy white,
pervasive Paradigm…!
[It's also a vision of
love.]
Here Crane gives us a kind of
vision of the word,
the "multitudinous Verb," as
what his poem draws its energy
from and what it moves towards.
 
It is not a Christian Word,
importantly.
It is, I think,
a name for a creative process
that's accessed in and through
our powers of language.
"The word" in Crane's poem is
secular and historical but yet
it unfolds from what he calls an
"Everpresence,"
beyond time,
towards which the poem is
questing.
It is a creativity,
a kind of power of world-making
that's embodied in our language.
Crane is imagining a
post-Christian religion for
which America provides
iconography and myths.
The poem is an encyclopedia of
American places and American
culture – popular culture and
burlesque in "National Winter
Garden,"
in "The River," in "Virginia."
There's slang,
jazz, advertising,
all of that,
worked into the poem.
The poem combines a kind of
popular storybook history of
figures like Rip Van Winkle and
the most challenging,
abstract modernist poetics at
the same time.
Every line is loaded with
symbols and referents linking up
to other lines in the same way.
 
In the same way,
Crane is suggesting that every
moment in American history links
up with others and with a larger
structure of action,
of which it is part.
Crane's poem is therefore,
I think, at once knowingly
naive and hyper-sophisticated,
both of these things at once.
Crane composed the poem through
the funding, with the funding of
Otto Kahn, a businessman and
philanthropist,
and he explains his outline of
the poem at still a relatively
early period of composition in
that letter to Otto Kahn that I
included for you last time.
 
Well, I'll refer to it briefly.
 
Keeping in mind that table of
contents I showed you before,
there's a kind of story of
American history told in large
in the poem in which Crane moves
from Columbus to the section
called "Powhatan's Daughter,"
where the theme is the betrayal
of the land in the conquest of
the continent.
In the middle,
in "Cape Hatteras," when Crane
is writing about invention and
technology in American culture,
his theme is also the Civil War
and World War One;
again, a kind of betrayal of
vision by which technology
becomes a means to kill.
 
In his letter to Kahn,
he talks about having a section
on John Brown that would take up
the topic of slavery.
This section was never written
but there are traces of it you
find in the section called "The
River."
In each of these sections,
Crane turns to and looks to,
again, hobos,
marginal figures who are
emblems of lost promise,
who seem to represent
possibilities included in but
also marginalized by American
history, American culture.
 
You can understand these
figures, such as the sailor that
you meet in "Cutty Sark,"
as versions of the authors to
whom Crane appeals throughout,
through allusion and epigraph:
Melville,
Dickinson, Poe in "The Tunnel."
Crane reaches back to these
authors, canonical for us,
authors that you study but that
were largely left out of
accounts of American literary
history in the 1920s,
who themselves appeared to be
marginals.
These are versions of a kind of
community that Crane wants to
recover and carry forward for
the creative promise that they
seem to embody.
Well, let me just point to the
poem's, let's say,
two different endings.
The history of the composition
of the poem is different from
the sequence that you read.
 
Because Crane began at both
ends, the end of the poem is
really, in one sense,
the middle.
When Crane completes "Cape
Hatteras," at last,
after struggling with this
section for a couple of years,
he completes the span of the
bridge in one particular image,
and that's towards the end of
the section on 636.
And he evokes and quotes
Whitman;
Whitman, again,
here seen as a kind of marginal
who is recovered for American
culture through the poem's
imaginative act.
Whitman is addressed:
Recorders ages hence
[that's a quote from Whitman's
"Calamus"
poems], yes, they shall hear
In their own veins uncancelled
thy sure tread [Whitman]
And read thee by the aureole
[the halo]
'round thy head
Of pasture-shine,
Panis Angelicus!
 
[Bread of angels.
 
Here Whitman becomes a kind of
figure for a secular communion.]
yes, Walt,
Afoot again,
and onward without halt--
Not soon, nor suddenly,--no,
never to let go
My hand
in yours,
Walt Whitman--
so--
That's a moment when in this
hand clasp a certain aspiration
of the poem is completed and a
connection to the past is
achieved and asserted.
The conclusion of the poem that
we find at the end of "Atlantis"
is another vision,
and I'll conclude with that.
It's, I think,
something to be contrasted with
this triumphant and reassuring
conclusion that "Cape Hatteras"
offers.
Here are the last two sublime
stanzas of the poem.
 
Migrations that must
needs void memory,
Inventions that cobblestone the
heart,--
Unspeakable Thou Bridge to
Thee, O Love.
Thy pardon for this history,
whitest Flower,
O Answerer of all,--Anemone,--
Now while thy petals spend the
suns about us,
hold--
(O Thou whose radiance doth
inherit me)
Atlantis,--hold thy floating
singer late!
Here, Atlantis is brought into
being with the singer himself on
the verge of drowning,
"thy floating singer."
And then finally Crane
dedicates himself to this vision
which he calls "Everpresence":
So to thine Everpresence,
beyond time,
Like spears ensanguined of one
tolling star
That bleeds infinity--the
orphic strings [now the cables
of the bridge
have become the strings of
Orpheus's lyre],
Sidereal phalanxes,
leap and converge [and again
you can see the
structure of the bridge imaged
there]:
-- One Song, one Bridge of Fire!
Is it Cathay,
Now pity steeps the grass and
rainbows ring
The serpent with the eagles in
the leaves…?
Whispers antiphonal in azure
swing.
The poem ends with this
question, "Is it Cathay?"
 
Columbus's question:
an error, a mistake.
It is the nature of the object
of desire to be misnamed,
precisely because it has no one
name.
And even in this error,
this kind of defeat,
there is for Crane an affirming
of the scope of desire,
precisely through its failure
to be contained by a single
reference.
Well, we'll stop now.
And I know you have done your
work and gathered a note.
We'll collect these and put
together our own annotated
version of the poem.
 
