Introduction 29visionary history. Crane’s bridge is to Atlantis, in fulfillment of the Platonic
quest of Crane’s Columbus. Eliot’s bridge is to the Inferno, in fulfillment of
the neo-Christian condemnation of Romantic, Transcendentalist, Gnostic
quest. Crane’s Sibylline voices stream upward; his night-illuminated bridge
becomes a transparent musical score, until Orpheus is born out of the flight
of strings. Eliot’s Sibyl wishes to die; her counterpart plays a vampiric score
upon her own hair, until instead of Orphic birth upwards we have an
impotent triumph of time.
This contrast, and others equally sharp, constitutes the context of
Crane’s aspiration in “Atlantis.” But this aspiration, which is for knowledge,
in the particular sense of Gnosis, yields to Eliot, as it must, much of the
world of things-as-they-are. The closing images of “The Tunnel,” the
section of The Bridge preceding “Atlantis,” combine The Waste Land’s
accounts of loss with Whitman’s darker visions of those losses in “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry”:
And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under,
Tossed from the coil of ticking towers.... Tomorrow,
And to be.... Here by the River that is East—
Here at the waters’ edge the hands drop memory;
Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting he.
How far away the star has pooled the sea—
Or shall the hands be drawn away, to die?
Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,
O Hand of Fire
gatherest—Emerson’s was a Gnosis without Gnosticism; Crane’s religion, at its
darkest, shades from Orphism into Gnosticism, in a negative transcendence
even of the Whitman who proclaimed, “It is not upon you alone the dark
patches fall, / The dark threw its patches upon me also.” The negative
transcendence of “Atlantis” surmounts the world, history, and even precursors
as knowing, in their rival ways, as Eliot and Whitman. Crane condenses the
upward intensities of his first six octaves by a deliberate recall of his own
Columbus triumphantly but delusively chanting: “I bring you back Cathay!”
But Crane’s Columbus invoked the Demiurge under Emily Dickinson’s name
for him, “Inquisitor! incognizable Word / Of Eden.” This beautiful pathos of
defeat, in “Ave Maria,” was consonant with Whitman’s “Prayer of Columbus,”
where the battered, wrecked old mariner denied all knowledge: “I know not
even my own word past or present.” Crane’s American burden, in the second