Modern American Poetry

The Shadow of a Myth 73

poem, it will leap far beyond the street, but its function will be similar: an
emblem of the eternal, providing a passage between the Ideal and the
transitory sensations of history, a way to unify them.
In the earliest lines written for the new poem, the bridge was the
location of an experience like that which ends Faustus and Helen: the
imagination spanning beyond despair.

And midway on that structure I would stand

One moment, not as diver, but with arms

That open to project a disk’s resilience

Winding the sun and planets in its face.

* * *

Expansive center, pure moment and electron

That guards like eyes that must look always down

In reconcilement of our chains and ecstasy

Crashing manifoldly on us as we hear

The looms, the wheels, the whistles in concord

Tethered and welded as the hills of dawn ...^3

Somewhat like Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge, here the poet
experiences harmony, his troubled self annihilated in a moment of worship.
Subsequently Crane developed a narrative to precede this experience. In the
narrative, or myth, the poet, like Faustus, was to be the hero, and his task a
quest—not for Helen but her modern equivalent: Brooklyn Bridge.
Although the bridge lay at the end of quest, it was not, like the grail in
The Waste Land,simply a magical object occupying a given location: It does
not wait to be found, but to be created. That is, it represents not an external
“thing,” but an internal process, an act of consciousness. The bridge is not
“found” in “Atlantis,” the final section of the poem, but “made” throughout
the poem. In “Atlantis” what has been “made” is at last recognized and
named: “O Thou steeled Cognizance.” Its properties are not magical but
conceptual: it is a “Paradigm” of love and beauty, the eternal ideas which lie
behind and inform human experience.
If we follow the poet’s Platonic idea, to “think” the bridge is to perceive
the unity and wholeness of history. In the poem, history is not chronological
nor economic nor political. Crane wrote: “History, and fact, location, etc., all
have to be transfigured into abstract form that would almost function
independently of its subject matter.” Crane intended to re-create American