Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 275transposition of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive.”^69 This
transposition became his method of trying to move “beyond despair,”
showing “one inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.”
Crane’s lyrical masterpiece “Voyages” is a coherent sequence or “suite”
of six sea poems that he wrote between 1921 and 1925. His most personal
poem, it traces a homosexual love affair with a young sailor, commonly
designated as E.O., through the arc of elation, excitement, separation,
betrayal, and loss. The final poem ends with the poet’s solitary vision of ideal
beauty. Crane’s attempt to reconcile the erotic and the spiritual in love,
indeed to comprehend the psychology of romantic love, is played out against
the constant backdrop of the sea, which appears in the sequence as dangerous
and threatening as well as “a great wink of eternity” and, finally, a source of
visionary solace. Crane borrowed some of the sea imagery from the
unpublished poems of Samuel Greenberg, who died in 1916 at the age of
twenty-three; more profoundly, his poem is saturated with the arresting
vocabulary and imagery of Melville’s Moby-Dick.In “Voyages” Crane uses the
sea to mirror and record the experience of love and its loss. His great subject
is the precariousness of ecstasy in a phenomenal world and the necessary,
doomed quest for spiritual wholeness. In the final lyric, the vision of Belle
Isle and poetry itself become the compensation for the death of love: “It is
the unbetrayable reply / Whose accent no farewell can know.”^70
The Bridgeis a loosely joined sequence of fifteen poems that Crane
wrote between 1923 and 1929. His original idea was to present the “Myth of
America,” a “mystical synthesis” of the American past, present, and future.
His ambition was to become “a suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine
age,” and he intended his poem as an “epic of modern consciousness,” a full-
scale reply to The Waste Landand a simultaneous embrace of contemporary
life. Whitman acts as the presiding spirit of the poem, and Crane asserts a
spiritual alliance with Whitman’s large, transcendental vision of America. In
the many years of writing his lyrical epic, however, he often suffered a
wavering confidence about the spiritual worthiness of American life in an
industrial and scientific era: “If only America were half as worthy today to be
spoken of as Whitman spoke of it fifty years ago there might be something
for me to say—not that Whitman received or required any tangible proof of
his intimations, but that time has shown how increasingly lonely and
ineffectual his confidence stands.”^71 One of the underlying dramas of The
Bridgeis Crane’s struggle to maintain his initial optimistic faith in the
spiritual possibilities of America in the twenties. Along with such writers as
Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford, he sought to repudiate American
materialism by finding a higher idealism in American culture. At the same