The Bridge

The test is subtractive, and the book answers it unevenly. The frame is required: the Proem, “How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest”, and Atlantis close one span, and the day from The Harbor Dawn to the midnight of The Tunnel is the road between. Within Powhatan’s Daughter the descent is compelled, each poem one stage further back into the land, from a Manhattan bedroom through childhood to the hoboes’ railroad, the Mississippi and the burning of Maquokeeta. What holds the axis at 7.5, the lowest of the twelve, is the rest: Indiana is sentimental and adds nothing The Dance has not paid for, Virginia and Southern Cross are slight, Quaker Hill states the decline the book elsewhere enacts, and Cape Hatteras is a third longer than its argument. The spine is necessary; a third of the book is assembled.

Score: 7.5 / 10

What is brought into the open: that a modern American consciousness, among machines, subways and advertising, has no myth adequate to it, and that the continent’s buried past is available only as a vision recovered against the grain of the present. The Tunnel discloses this as a condition: the subway as hell, the crowd’s chatter heard as “Performances, assortments, résumés”, Poe’s head swinging from the strap, a city in a damnation it does not know it is in. The River finds the last carriers of the land’s knowledge in the hoboes. But the book’s central claim, that the bridge can be the myth that holds this world, is sung more than shown. Atlantis is a vision of synthesis, not a truth that holds when stated, and much of the disclosure is of a mood of longing.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Height and frequency both, and here they are among the highest in American verse. The Proem rises in nearly every quatrain, “O harp and altar, of the fury fused”, to the prayer that the bridge “of the curveship lend a myth to God”. Ave Maria gives Columbus on the homeward sea, the Atlantic rising round a man who carries the news of a world. The Dance is a sustained transport, a burning at the stake told from inside a vision: “I could not pick the arrows from my side”. The Tunnel is the dreadful counterpart, an elevation of terror. Atlantis holds the summit for eight octaves. The slack songs and the bombast of parts of Cape Hatteras pull the frequency down; but no long American poem of its century rises so often or so far.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Myth built, not only evoked: the book’s whole wager is construction. The bridge is made a sacred object, harp and altar, an arc joining the ground to God. Pocahontas becomes the body of the continent, sought back through the railroad, the river and the burning chief. Columbus opens the quest and Atlantis or Cathay closes it, on the question “Is it Cathay”. Rip Van Winkle is the American who has slept through his history; Poe in The Tunnel is the poet damned in the city, a Virgil without a road out. These figures bear load: The Dance, where the speaker passes through Maquokeeta’s death into the land, carries the book’s ascent. The charge is the masonry. The sources, Plato, Columbus, the Indian, Whitman, the clipper ships, do not all join, and some, Cutty Sark’s clippers and the Wright brothers of Cape Hatteras, remain allusion.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance is Whitman’s America and his long poem of the self and the nation; the Romantic ode and visionary lyric of Blake, Shelley and Keats; the Elizabethan density of Marlowe and Donne in the line; and, as the immediate pressure, The Waste Land (1922), which Crane read as the age’s verdict and set out to answer with an affirmation. The turn is twofold: against Eliot, an epic of assent written in the same modern city with the same machinery; against Whitman, a diction compressed to the point of private logic. The stake was real: years, a patron’s money and a reputation, staked on a form that Allen Tate and Yvor Winters judged a failure. Held below 9.0 because the swerve from Whitman is more of idiom than of form.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Would changing the form change what the book knows? In large part, yes. A continuous narrative could not do what the sequence does: the book knows America as fragments that a vision must span, and the form is a span, separate poems held between two arches, with a day and a westward and backward journey as its cables. The marginal gloss beside The River sets the train’s advertising against the land’s silence on the page itself; Cutty Sark’s typographic counterpoint sets a drunk sailor’s talk against a vision of clippers; The Tunnel runs the commuter’s ride as a descent. There form is the instrument. But the weaker poems, the ballad of Indiana and the loose paragraphs of Quaker Hill, are in forms that know nothing their content does not state, and the architecture is legible more from Crane’s letters than from the sequence.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Evidence first: ninety-six years of return, and an argument that has not closed. The book has been reread as a failed epic, by Winters and Tate; as a triumph of visionary lyric, by Harold Bloom, who put Crane among the great American poets; as a homosexual poem whose love is coded into the landscape; as an American Romantic crisis-poem in the line from Emerson and Whitman; and as a modernist city poem beside Eliot and Joyce. Each reading opens something the others did not see. The line itself keeps yielding, its compressed images rewarding slow decoding, and the density of the Proem and Atlantis has not been exhausted by close reading. Return is concentrated among poets and the academy rather than general readers, which bounds the evidence, and the weaker poems do not keep yielding.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The field is American poetry of the twentieth century and, more narrowly, the modernist long poem in English. The intrinsic force is high. The Bridge is the major counter-statement to The Waste Land, the attempt to show that the modern long poem could affirm, could be lyric throughout and could make a national myth out of machines, and it kept open the visionary Romantic line that high modernism had closed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Bloom’s criticism made Crane a central figure; poets have kept him as a touchstone, and Tennessee Williams took the epigraph of A Streetcar Named Desire from Crane, though from “The Broken Tower”, not this book. But the book did not redirect its field as The Waste Land or Pound’s Cantos did; its influence ran through the line rather than the form.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Ninety-six years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole, as Crane saw it into print; nothing is lost, and the two editions of 1930 differ little. Presence has been continuous since publication: in print, anthologized, the Proem and parts of Atlantis and The River above all, taught, reread by poets and championed in the criticism. But it has never been a book of general readers, and that narrowness is charged. Its surface is fixed to its moment in places: the Wright brothers and early aviation of Cape Hatteras, the subway and advertising, the jazz-age burlesque of National Winter Garden. Most of the book has outlived the conditions that produced it, and the bridge itself still stands. A tenth comes off the step for its age for a presence that is narrow and largely academic.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Judged on Crane’s English. At its height the command is complete and load-bearing. The Proem’s quatrains are among the most finished in American verse, their pentameter weighted with Elizabethan stress. Atlantis sustains a rhymed octave with an orchestral sound, “Whispers antiphonal in azure swing”, and “Through the bound cable strands, the arching path / Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings”. The Dance moves in short quatrains of driven rhythm, and The River’s shift from the train’s talk of advertising to the long slow blank verse of the Mississippi is a master’s modulation. But the making is uneven. Cape Hatteras swells into apostrophe, “O Walt!”, and into catalogues the verse does not hold; Indiana’s ballad sentiment is flat; and the logic of metaphor at times yields lines whose sense must be supplied from outside the poem.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Does one physics govern? The law Crane intends is the quest: every poem a station on the way from the harbor dawn to the vision of Atlantis, the bridge its figure. Take the two most distant elements: National Winter Garden, a burlesque dancer in a Broadway house, and Atlantis, the bridge as a visionary absolute. They can be made to obey one law, the body as the debased form of the desire that rises in the vision, Pocahontas fallen and then redeemed, and the book reaches for it: the woman of Three Songs is the Indian bride’s modern shadow. The same law holds The Tunnel and the Proem as inverse images. But the tone breaks. Indiana’s sentiment, Quaker Hill’s moralizing and the apostrophes to Whitman are in a different physics from the visionary compression elsewhere. The range is wide; the law that governs it is strained.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Judged on what the book holds, as a lyric sequence. The continent and its history: Columbus, the Indian, the pioneers, the clipper ships, the New England decline of Quaker Hill, flight. The modern city and its labour: the harbor, the subway, the railroad and the men who ride it. Technology, as the bridge, the train and the airplane. The sacred throughout, in the Proem’s prayer and in Atlantis. Sex and the body, in the songs and The Dance. Consciousness, as the poet’s own quest, and childhood memory in Van Winkle. Death, in Poe and Maquokeeta. These are many orders, held in one structure rather than listed, at least in the central poems. What keeps the figure at 8.5: the family and the state are thin, and the integration of history and the present is intended more often than achieved.

Score: 8.5 / 10