Modern American Poetry

(^30) Harold Bloom
half of “Atlantis,” is to start again where Dickinson and Whitman ended, and
where Eliot had sought to show no fresh start was possible. Knowledge in
precisely the Gnostic sense—a knowing that knows the knower and is, in itself,
the form of salvation—becomes Crane’s formidable hymn addressed directly
to itself, to poem and to bridge, until they become momentarily “—One Song,
one Bridge of Fire!” But is this persuasively different from the “Hand of Fire”
that gathers the kiss of our agony?
The dialectic of Gnosticism is a triad of negation, evasion, and
extravagance. Lurianic Kabbalah renders these as contraction, breaking-of-
the-vessels, and restitution. Fate, freedom, power is the Emersonian or
American equivalent. All of these triads translate aesthetically into a dialectic
of limitation, substitution, and representation, as I have shown in several
critical books starting with A Map of Misreading. Crane’s negation or
limitation, his contraction into Fate, is scarcely different from Eliot’s, but
then such rival negative theologies as Valentinian Gnosticism and Johannine
Christianity are difficult to distinguish in their accounts of how to express
divinity. Gnostic evasion, like Crane’s notorious freedom and range in
troping, is dearly more inventive than authorized Christian modes of
substitution, just as Gnostic extravagance, again like Crane’s hyperbolical
Sublime, easily surpasses orthodox expressions of power.
Crane’s elaborate evasiveness is crucial in the seventh stanza of
“Atlantis,” where the upward movement of the tropology has ended, and a
westward lateral sweep of vision is substituted, with the bridge no longer
confronted and addressed, but seen now as binding the continent:
We left the haven hanging in the night—
Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel.
Pacific here at time’s end, bearing corn,—
Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel.
And still the circular, indubitable frieze
Of heaven’s meditation, yoking wave
To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds—
The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!
The third line implies not merely a circuit of the earth, but an achieved
peace at the end of days, a millennial harvest. When the bridge returns in this
stanza’s last four lines, it has become heaven’s own meditation, the known
knowing the human knower. And such a knowing leads Crane on to the
single most central stanza of his life and work: