Modern American Poetry

(^276) Edward Hirsch
time he read the development of American experience as analogous to the
growth of spiritual consciousness.
The crucial fact and symbol of Crane’s poem is Brooklyn Bridge itself.
To Crane the bridge not only connected Brooklyn to Manhattan, but also
linked the past to the present, earth to heaven. It was a product of modern
technology and science as well as a work of labor and art, a symbol of
America’s “constructive future” and “unique identity.” Beyond its
commercial and practical purposes, Crane also read it as a “harp and altar,”
a magnificent span between time and eternity, “terrific threshold of the
prophet’s pledge” (“Proem”), a sign of America’s religious need to transcend
the realm of ordinary experience in quest of ideal purity and permanence.
Crane’s different protagonists—Columbus in “Ave Maria,” the poet/pilgrim
in various guises and moods, whether contemplating Pocahontas and his own
childhood (section 1), giving an account of American history (section 4), or
riding and thinking about the subway as a modern hell (section 7)—are all
versions of the American wanderer or prodigal in a restive search for
America’s lost patrimony.^72 The urgency and importance of this quest signal
Crane’s full visionary ambition. His most important poem stands as a record
not so much of man’s spiritual fulfillment as of his enormous spiritual desire
and aspiration.
There were some compelling female lyricists in the twenties, all of
them—in one way or another—Romantic poets. Elinor Wylie, Sara
Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Leonie Adams, and Louise Bogan (in her
first two books) created a substantial body of lyric poetry that is essentially
romantic in its procedures, its rhetoric, and its attitudes.^73 Their poems—
many of them comparable to Elizabethan songs—assert the authority of the
female self through musical lyrics of intense personal feeling. Their work
belongs to the formal tradition of Anglo-American poetry and stands apart
from the stylistic revolution in American poetry in the twentieth century. It
also belongs to an alternative tradition of women’s poetry.
Modernism precipitated two distinct styles of women’s poetry that had
divided clearly by the twenties.^74 One style was the innovative Modernism of
such poets as Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, and
H.D. These poets were experimental in their methodologies. The female
lyric poets, on the other hand, projected themselves more personally through
a received poetic style and form. Their pared-down language and the direct
way in which they treated their subjects were Modernist, but their work
repudiated free verse and generally observed the conventions of the
traditional nineteenth-century short poem. Their well-crafted lyrics have the
colorings of Romantic poetry.