A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 397

poem in the sequence, the poet beseeches Brooklyn Bridge to act as a mediator

between the actual and the ideal:

Sleepless as the river under thee

Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,

Unto us lowliest sometimes sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

The poet is appealing to the bridge as a figure, of course, rather than a given object.

He has transformed the actual bridge into an ideal, liberating symbol: uniting river

and sea, land and sky in one revelatory “myth,” a single inviolate curve that leaps

upward toward the absolute. In doing so, he has offered one small illustration of

how the two dimensions, the mundane and the visionary, can be related – and how,

consequently, his prayers can be answered.

“Unless poetry can absorb the machinery,” Crane said, “... then poetry has failed

of its full contemporary function.” In choosing Brooklyn Bridge for his “myth,”

Crane was making a deliberate attempt to “absorb the machine,” to find a source of

creativity in the industrial age. Traversing the same stretch of river, Whitman had

used Brooklyn Ferry, with its perpetual ebb and flow of passengers, to symbolize

what he called the “eternal float of solution,” the “simple, compact, well-join’d

scheme” to which all passing things belong. Crane had at his disposal a comparable,

and yet significantly more contemporary, image: the bridge, that is a part of the

technological age and yet somehow seems to “condense eternity.” “Thy cables breathe

the North Atlantic still,” exclaims the poet, “And we have seen night lifted in

thine arms.” Elliptical and allusive in texture, associative and even disjunctive in

structure, The Bridge is clearly much more of a modern epic than “Song of Myself,”

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” or Leaves of Grass as a whole. Yet it is, finally, in that great

tradition initiated by Whitman in that it is, above all, an American epic, concerned

with spiritual possibility rather than historical achievement, creating a hero or heroic

consciousness instead of simply celebrating one. Whitman, Crane once observed,

“was able to co-ordinate those forces in America which seem most intractable,

fusing them into a universal vision which takes on additional significance as time

goes on.” The same is surely true of Crane. Like all other major attempts at American

epic, The Bridge is responsive to the material pressures of the nation and its promise –

which, for Crane, means its mystical potential. And it remains open, requiring the

reader to complete it – by continuing the spiritual journey begun by the poet.

It embarks on the road of visionary discovery in the hope that, one day, other

visionaries and other Americans will follow.

Making it new in prose

As Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was dying, she asked those with her, “What is the

answer?” There was no reply and, after a short pause, she laughed and added, “Then

what is the question?” Those last words were characteristic of a writer who was

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