A History of American Literature

396 Making It New: 1900–1945

As Crane indicates here, his long poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”

grew directly out of his mystical experience and, in a sense, tried to recover it, to

make it and the knowledge it supplied available to every one of his readers. Faustus,

Crane explained, is “the symbol of ... the poetic and imaginative man of all times,”

Helen the symbol of an abstract “sense of beauty”; and the marriage between them

is seen, not as an event really, but as a continuing possibility – the moment of

communion between the soul and the spirit of essential Beauty which illuminates all

existence afterwards.

The poetry that followed “Faustus and Helen” includes “At Melville’s Tomb,” a

hymn of praise to the prophetic author of Moby-Dick, and “Royal Palm,” an evocative

description of the “green rustlings” of a palm tree that is also a symbolic account of

the imagination climbing to discovery of the absolute, “launched above / Mortality –

ascending emerald-bright.” But perhaps the most powerful expression of Crane’s

visionary impulse in his lyric poetry is “Voyages.” A series of six poems written

over three years, these are, as Crane explained at the time he was writing them, “love

poems” and “sea poems” too: the sea appears in them as a threat to the poet-lover

and as a rival, as a partner, an enemy, and eventually as a source of comfort and

vision. One reason for the constant presence of the sea in the sequence is that the

person to whom they are addressed was a sailor living temporarily in New York;

another, that the poet and his lover stayed together in an apartment overlooking

the harbor; and still another, that the sea was always a suggestive image for Crane.

Like Whitman and Melville, he used the sea to describe both the cruelty of this

“ broken” world and the mysterious “answers” that ultimately might make the world

whole again.

Apart from “Voyages,” Crane’s greatest achievement of his visionary years was

his attempt at what he termed a “Myth of America,” The Bridge. “I am concerned

with the future of America,” Crane wrote, “not because I think America has any

so-called par value as a state. ... It is only because I feel persuaded that there are

destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual qualities ... not to be

developed so completely elsewhere.” It is the old problem of the American dream

the poet poses, in a series of eight poems that follow the westward thrust of the

bridge into the body of the continent. The movement is one in time as well as space;

and as Crane moves across the continent he continually presents the reader with

the same question. How, he asks, can the ideal possibilities of people be liberated

so as to recover the kingdom of heaven on earth? How can an arc or bridge be

constructed between the world in which we live and the world of the imagination,

so that the life of the individual may assume a fresh nobility and the forms of the

community approximate to the divine? Having asked the question, he also tries to

answer it. For Crane is no less visionary in that he sees himself as an agent of

liberation, formulating in his work the new relationship between consciousness

and reality which will make the changes he requires possible. The Bridge, like so

much of Crane’s verse, offers a series of visionary acts intended to alter our minds –

to propose to us what Crane called “a new hierarchy of faith” – as a preliminary to

altering our surroundings. In “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge,” for example, the opening

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