Modern American Poetry

(^74) Alan Trachtenberg
history according to a pattern he derived from its facts. His version of
American history has nothing in common with the ceremonial parade of
Founding Fathers and bearded generals of popular culture. The poet’s idea,
and especially his distinction between history and “abstract form,” is closer
to what the anthropologist Mircea Eliade describes as the predominant
ontology of archaic man—the myth of “eternal return.” According to Eliade,
the mind of archaic man sought to resist history—the line of “irreversible
events”—by recreating, in his rituals, the pre-temporal events of his
mythology, such as the creation of the world. Unable to abide a feeling of
uniqueness, early men identified, in their rituals, the present with the mythic
past, thus abolishing the present as an autonomous moment of time. All
events and actions “acquire a value,” writes Eliade, “and in so doing become
real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that
transcends them.” The only “real” events are those recorded in mythology,
which in turn become models for imitation, “paradigmatic gestures.” All
precious stones are precious because of thunder from heaven; all sacred
buildings are sacred because they are built over the divine Center of the
world; all sexual acts repeat the primordial act of creation. A non-precious
stone, a non-sacred building, a non-sanctified act of sex—these are not real.
History, as distinct from myth, consists of such random acts and events,
underived from an archetype; therefore history is not real and must be
periodically “annulled.” By imitating the “paradigmatic gesture” in ritual,
archaic men transported themselves out of the realm of the random, of
“irreversible events,” and “re-actualized” the mythic epoch in which the
original archetypal act occurred. Hence for the primitive as for the mystic,
time has no lasting influence: “events repeat themselves because they imitate
an archetype.” Like the mystic, the primitive lives in a “continual present.”^4
The Bridgeis a sophisticated and well-wrought version of the archaic
myth of return. The subject matter of the poem is drawn from legends about
American history: Columbus, Pocahontas, Cortez, De Soto, Rip Van
Winkel, the gold-rush, the whalers; and from contemporary reality:
railroads, subways, warplanes, office buildings, cinemas, burlesque queens.
Woven among these strands are allusions to world literature: the Bible,
Plato, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Blake; and most important, to American
artists: Whitman, Melville, Poe, Dickinson, Isadora Duncan. The action of
the poem comprises through its fifteen sections, one waking day, from dawn
in “Harbor Dawn,” to midnight in “Atlantis.” Through the device of dream,
that single day includes vast stretches of time and space: a subway ride in the
morning extends to a railroad journey to the Mississippi, then back in time,
beyond De Soto, to the primeval world of the Indians,^5 then forward to the