Quoting this letter at even greater length, Thomas E. Yingling in his Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text, a book rich in political insight, is astonished, possibly even bewildered, at the Tom Jones (1749) reference. But I can certainly remember being a teenager, when gay men of letters assumed that the good-natured foundling’s light-hearted promiscuity was a self-evidently coded representation of bisexuality, or even homosexuality.
Here may be the place to mention that a reader taking his or her first dozen or so trips through The Bridge is likely — as were most of its early critics — to see its interest and energy centering in the lyricism and scene painting of “Proem,” “Ave Maria,” and the various sections of “Powhatan’s Daughter”—that is, The Bridge’s first half.
But a reader who has lived with the poem over years is more likely to appreciate the stately, greatly reflective, and meditative beauties and insights — as well as the austere and lucid structure — of the second half:
“Cutty Sark,” with which the first half ends, leaves us, as we have said, with the poet walking home over the Bridge at dawn, as Crane must have walked home many times to 110 Columbia Heights, contemplating the voyages of the great steamers, and probably remembering returning home — if we are to trust the restored epigraph that follows — to Emil. At this point, The Bridge begins its final, descending curve:
“Cape Hatteras” looks to the sky…
After the divigation of “Three Songs”—where the theme of sexual longing is heterosexualized for straight male readers (the Sestos and Abydos of the epigraph are two cities on opposite sides of the Hellespont, separated by water, whose literary import is precisely that they are not connected by a bridge, a separation which precipitates the tragedy of Hero, Priestess of Hesperus) — “Quaker Hill” (most cynical of the poem’s sections) looks out level with the earth…
With the epigraph from Blake’s “Morning,” “The Tunnel” plunges us beneath the ground for an infernal recapitulation of the impressionistic techniques of the poem’s first half (the fall of Atlantis proper), in which the poet glimpses Whitman’s — and his own — chthonic predecessor, Poe…
… to leave us, once more, in “Atlantis,” on the Bridge, flooded by the moon.
As a kind of progress report on The Bridge, on March 18, 1926, Crane wrote a letter to philanthropist Otto Kahn, who, a year before, had subsidized him with a thousand dollars.
Dear Mr. Kahn:
You were so kind as to express a desire to know from time to time how the Bridge was progressing, so I’m flashing in a signal from the foremast, as it were. Right now I’m supposed to be Don Christobal Colon returning from “Cathay,” first voyage. For mid-ocean is where the poem begins.
It concludes at midnight — at the center of Brooklyn Bridge. Strangely enough that final section of the poem has been the first to be completed — yet there’s a logic to it, after all; it is the mystic consummation toward which all the other sections of the poem converge. Their contents are implicit in its summary.
“Cutty Sark” was composed shortly after “Ave Maria,” the opening Columbus section; and though it’s possibly that, at first, Crane was not planning to include it in The Bridge, it is almost impossible to read it, right after the earlier poem, without seeing the aging, incoherent, inebriated sailor of the second poem as an older, ironized version — three hundred years later on — of the Christopher Columbus figure who narrates the earlier transatlantic meditation. (Try reading “Cutty Sark” against Whitman’s poem, “Prayer of Columbus,” the poem in Leaves of Grass that follows “Passage to India”—a poem whose importance in The Bridge we will shortly come to.) The five sections of Part II, “Powhatan’s Daughter,” that, in The Bridge’s final version, intervene, dilute that identification somewhat. But the suggestion of the individual’s persistence through history, associated, say, with “Van Winkle,” still holds it open.
In his letter to Kahn, Crane included a plan for the whole Bridge that may well have been growing in his mind for years:
I.
Columbus — Conquest of space, chaos.
II.
Pokahantus — The natural body of America-fertility, etc.
III.
Whitman — The Spiritual body of America. (A dialogue between Whitman and a dying soldier in a Washington hospital; the infraction of physical death, disunity, on the concept of immortality.)
IV.
John Brown (Negro Porter on Calgary Express making up births and singing to himself (a jazz form for this) of his sweetheart and the death of John Brown, alternately.)
V.
Subway — The encroachment of machinery on humanity; a kind of purgatory in relation to the open sky of last section.
VI.
The Bridge — A sweeping dithyramb in which the Bridge becomes the symbol of consciousness spanning time and space.
Shortly Crane wrote even longer outlines of the parenthetical narratives in Part III and Part IV. The following, recalling Whitman’s poem “To One Shortly to Die” and scenes from Specimen Days, Crane titled “Cape Hatteras”:
Whitman approaches the bed of a dying (southern) soldier — scene is in a Washington hospital. Allusion is made to this during the dialogue. The soldier, conscious of his dying condition, at the end of the dialogue asks Whitman to call a priest, for absolution. Whitman leaves the scene — deliriously the soldier calls him back. The part ends before Whitman’s return, of course. The irony is, of course, in the complete absolution which Whitman’s words have already given the dying man, before the priest is called for. This, alternated with the eloquence of the dying man, is the substance of the dialogue — the emphasis being on the symbolism of the soldier’s body having been used as a forge toward a state of Unity. His hands are purified of the death they have previously dealt by the principles Whitman hints at or enunciates (without talking up-stage, I hope) and here the ‘religious gunman’ motive returns much more explicitly than in F & H. [A reference to Crane’s poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.”] The agency of death is exercised in obscure ways as the agency of life. Whitman knew this and accepted it. The appeal of the scene must be made as much as possible independent of the historical ‘character’ of Walt.
And a still later outline for “Cape Hatteras” much closer to the poem as written, reads:
(1)
Cape — land — combination
conceive as a giant turning
(2)
Powerhouse
(3)
Offshoot — Kitty Hawk
Take off
(4)
War — in general
(5)
Resolution (Whitman)
Lines on Crane’s worksheets for “Cape Hatteras”—that stretch of southern New Jersey containing Whitman’s last home, in Camden, and (in the poem) the site of the plane wreckage — not used in the final version of the poem, possibly because they state a problem or a focus of the poem in terms too reductive, include, after the fourth stanza: