Bloom, Crane, Frank, Spengler

the work of winter

My latest, and last, essay for Tablet is out now in their new print edition. I wrote it last summer, during the brief moment I thought Kamala might win, but dreading four more years of Trump—and not at all suspecting just how bad they would be. The essay is, exoterically, on Harold Bloom (whose birthday it is today) and Hart Crane, tracing how the former developed many of his signature ideas through a reading of the latter. My original, long version, pasted below, traced as well Crane’s relationship to Waldo Frank and Oswald Spengler, whose theories about the West falling into cultural stagnation and political dictatorship haunted the writing of The Bridge. Just as my own fears about sterility and tyranny haunted my writing of this essay… and are why (along with all the other obvious reasons) this will be my last for Tablet.

If a few years ago it seemed to me (perhaps now clearly wrongly) useful or at least interesting to try to articulate there a thinking about liberalism and a critique of wokeness that were, I hoped, novel, raucous, peculiar, queer, etc. (that resisted, in other words, the sort of tepid boring centrism, the hemming-and-hawing, the performance of a politesse specific to a narrow class of ‘elite’ but superficial culture and distance from passion that liberalism reflecting on itself so often is)—and particularly in my latter essays on Philip Rieff, BAP, Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, etc., to consider the disturbingly illiberal drives that thrum within philosophy, literature, comedy, and all the other pieces of a proper life—it no longer seems worthwhile to continue that line of thought, and especially to do so in a venue that advances the political projects Tablet advances, which have little to do with my wish to preserve lucid decency in our political life and ludic indecency in my own writing.

I’m grateful for the editorial freedom they gave me (except when I wanted to make fun of Bari Weiss or endorse Kamala—or write about Jewish geniuses they considered too obscure like Robert Gluck), and of course, the money. If any of you readers out there would like to give me money (and, why not, freedom), and are not currently bombing, deporting, and defunding everything in the way of feeling finally ‘safe’ (weren’t we opposed to safety-ism?), get in touch! (also get in touch if, on a lighter note, you’re in New York and would like to get coffee towards the end of the month, when I’ll be in town for a bit). Essay below:

Hart Crane was Harold Bloom’s first literary love. As Bloom told the story, again and again, throughout decades of autobiographical asides in many books of criticism and scholarship, he met Crane’s great poem of America, The Bridge (1930) when he and the poem were both aged ten (1940). The poem was at the time understood, nearly universally, to have been a failure. Its antiquated and obscure diction, ecstatic addresses to inanimate objects, and attempt to cover the whole of national political and literary history from the voyage of Columbus to a fantastical subway ride with the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe provoked embarrassment, contempt, or pity in nearly all readers except the young Bloom.

The future critic made it his life’s mission to show his countrymen that—for all its evident faults—The Bridge was a masterpiece. To defend Crane, he assembled the ideas about poetry scattered in the poet’s letters and essays, becoming spokesman for Crane’s critical as well as poetic genius. Without always acknowledging Crane as their source, Bloom elaborated a suite of Cranian concepts, from what he termed the “anxiety of influence” to the central role of “imagination” in a modern “Romantic tradition” that connected a set of American and English poets, which Crane had taught him to admire. Against the reigning poet-critics of the era, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (both of whom, Bloom noted, were reactionary antisemites), Bloom made Crane, along with the predecessors whom Crane acknowledged, the center of the American canon.

Crane taught Bloom that literature is an agonic, erotic, and ultimately tragic set of relations among rival geniuses, and that a great work—as Crane meant The Bridge to be—is at once a victory for its writer over his chosen ancestors and an emblematic affirmation of a collective (national and human) capacity to grant meaning to our existence through the elaboration of new myths and the rehabilitation of old ones. The poet had wanted to show that it was still possible to write a poem on a vast scale and in a grand style, celebrating (while also critiquing) the American present, invoking a complex past, and envisioning a hopeful future. Crushed by the overwhelmingly hostile reception to The Bridge, he died in 1932, most likely of suicide. Bloom, too, albeit in a less dramatic way, seems to have been darkened and diminished by his struggle to affirm The Bridge and to rewrite literary history and aesthetic theory in such a way as to teach Americans to appreciate their great poet.

In the last decades of his life, he came to be known chiefly as a railer on behalf of the ‘Western Canon’ (never enriched by such militancy) against what he took to be its many enemies, which included feminism, multiculturalism and Christian humanism—anything on behalf of which misguided readers tried to make literature a means of moral and political improvement rather than an arena of love and struggle to equal, and if possible surpass, the otherwise overwhelming achievements of our brilliant forebears, Crane chief among them. These rebarbative polemics wasted some of Bloom’s prolific energies (his bibliography is staggering). They also, in their alienating qualities of aggression and obscurity, prevented recent generations of readers from grasping the sensitivity and vitality of his work, which hymns, sometimes openly, sometimes obliquely, a central poet of America, who died with a failing hope that we might someday, as Bloom did, inherit him.

In 1926, half-way advanced in his composition of The Bridge, Crane wrote one of his most perceptive and sympathetic readers, the Jewish literary critic Waldo Frank, to explain the purpose of the poem-in-process, which required first explaining the task of “the artist.” Crane argued that the latter aims to connect, through symbolic elaboration, a private “vision” to other members of his society. The artist creates what may seem at first to be a deliberately obscure style by which he reveals shared experiences of the present and points out a new ideal for the future. He is a “bridge” linking individual to collective life, and spanning diverse eras. Thus The Bridge is, among other things, a poem about poetry, and, more specifically, a poem affirming the possibility of creative art in the American present.

Such an affirmation, Crane worried, might be “insane,” a “delusion,” and “playing Don Quixote” given the reasons for pessimism, the most pressing of which was that “my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision.” The sense of coming at the end of America’s era of promise, of being perhaps too late to profit from what had once been the wide-open expanses of its natural and cultural frontiers, shadowed Crane’s brief poetic life and Bloom’s longer critical one.

For Crane and his circle of poet and critic friends like Frank, America was already an old country with a rich literary past. He admired Whitman, along with Dickinson and Melville—more or less the nineteenth-century writers most of us now see as the foundation of our national literature—but feared that, on the one hand, their vast accomplishments might never be equaled by his own, and, on the other, that the cultural conditions in which they had pursued (to little critical or popular appreciation at the time) their bold experiments might now have been abolished in the era of the radio, airplane, skyscraper and world war. Bloom himself, beginning his own career as a writer a generation after Crane, feared that we had entered a late, decadent period of American letters and society—and that Crane himself had been not only our most recent major poet, but perhaps the last we could ever produce.

A fear of coming too late for being American to mean having an open horizon, of condemnation to a shrinking age with no place for ambition seems to hang over artists and critics throughout history. If those of us living in 2025 are tempted to imagine the Jazz Age and the Baby Boom as golden moments of American history, it is a strange combination of depressing (because the problem is so long-standing) and encouraging (because the problem, if actually trans-historical, can perhaps be dismissed as merely an unchangeable and therefore uninteresting human limitation) to find that some of their most sensitive observers felt that even the times we retrospectively envy were ‘too late’ for cultural achievement. This pessimism was conjoined for both Crane and Bloom with the idea that if it were possible for an artist to overcome the inertia of the present and the intimidating examples of the past, this would have to happen through a semi-amorous rivalry with other literary figures, taking a chosen admired forbear as model and target.

What Bloom would name the “anxiety of influence” was theorized by Crane in 1922. In a letter to his then-friend Allen Tate, Crane wrote almost gushingly of the man he then saw as the poet to beat, T.S. Eliot, confiding, “I must have read ‘Prufrock’ twenty-five times and things like the ‘Preludes’ more often.” Eliot had created unsurpassable works that expressed what Crane saw as a bleak outlook on art and modernity. For Eliot the West—and particularly the United States—had broken with the unified traditional culture in which the creation of epic works of genius was possible (the causes of this break included industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, not least of Jews, whom Eliot often derided in his poems and letters). Eliot’s poetry was thus a two-fold “impasse” for any other would-be poet, insofar as it seemed impossible to compete with and insofar as it seemed to counsel despair.

Eliot as critic, moreover, had already described the plight of someone like Crane faced with Eliot the poet. In an essay “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry,” Eliot, as Crane summarized in his letter to Tate, explained how late-coming poets must admire, envy, and hate the writers they see as pre-eminent, with a homoerotic charge that Eliot (whose own sexuality was hardly straightforward) compared to a “love affair.” It is hard to imagine a more thorough and dispiriting sort of secondary-ness—not only are you not the best poet of your generation, but the best poet of your generation is also the best critic, and has written an essay explaining—with devastating accuracy—why he makes you alternately simp and seethe.

For Crane, then, The Bridge would have to defeat Eliot as poet by showing that, first, he could write something more technically masterful and brilliantly original than Eliot’s own work, and second, that the content of this not-yet-written superior poetry could be culturally affirmative. He might thus turn Eliot from a menace to a spur—at the same time confirming, through his impassioned struggle, how right Eliot as critic had been about the psychic conflict thrumming through the canon.

The heated relations of these young rivals, charted by Langdon Hammer in Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (1993), appeared to Bloom as the essence of literary ambition—just as Crane’s description of his project in The Bridge of linking individual to collective experience, vision to myth, appeared to Bloom as the measure of poetic achievement. Bloom’s criticism can be read as an elaboration of Crane’s insights—although it is also, we will see, in a few points of great importance a distortion of them.

In Bloom’s early work, and in his most sustained bursts of scholarship after, he could discover compelling (and sometimes historically accurate) relations of envy, desire and emulation among the poets he studied, showing how this or that one tried to equal, escape, outdo, etc., specific elements of chosen predecessors. Bloom reads a particular poem as a ‘response’ to a poem by another poet, occasionally acknowledging that he is unconcerned with whether the author of the former would have even heard of the latter. This sort of criticism can be exciting, although it can just as often have something of the feel of a party game or an amateurish exercise in improvisational comedy (what if Wallace Stevens wrote to Christopher Marlowe? I think it would go something like this…).

Bloom reshuffled the history of literature in other ways as well. He insisted, for example, on placing Wallace Stevens before Crane in his flexible timeline of American letters. Stevens’ Harmonium (1923) predates Crane’s first book, White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge, it is true, but he outlived Crane by some decades, and wrote much of his most important and characteristic work after 1930. It is important, however, for Bloom that “the last word,” as he wrote in 1965, of the American poetic tradition “belongs not to Stevens but to a poet who should have died after him,” Crane.

With astonishing freedom, Bloom put in conversation poets who had never read each other, moved them in and out of historical order, and re-wrote the poems he most admired. He frequently asserted that The Bridge ought to be read not as it was published (that is, as Crane had wanted it to be read), but with some of its less successful sections excised, and its major pieces shuffled, based on a combination of what he took to be the order of its composition and his own readerly preferences. This was in one sense a feat of critical hubris, a violence against the text. But in another it was an honest recognition that The Bridge, like any of the ambitious poems of its era, is difficult reading. It is full of head-scratchers and puzzlingly recondite vocabulary—although not arid or authoritarian or erudite in its name-dropping (in the manner of Eliot, Pound, or Zukofsky). Much of its obscurity has to do with its oddly unmodern style, which seems to be imitating Victorian imitations of early modern English, and which continually tempts the reader to dismissive mockery.

Take, for instance, this passage of the section “Cape Hatteras,” which Crane placed in the middle of The Bridge, and Bloom puts as its conclusion. Here Crane means to connect the nineteenth-century age of Whitman with the modern age of air travel. Whitman, playing on the Biblical conceit of ‘all flesh is grass,’ linked his own imagination and body to the American nation by envisioning himself along with living and dead fellow citizens as blades of grass. Crane traces the Wright brothers’ flight from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (near Cape Hatteras) and the destruction of aerial combats and bombing in the First World War to question whether our ascent into space (lifting off from the grass) represents new possibilities for the poetic inspiration and national progress, or a betrayal of Whitman’s earthy, perhaps earth-bound, democratic humanism.

The poet’s flight swings past a blimp:

While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger

Of pendulous auroral beaches…

Whether this is ridiculous or sublime—or some combination of both—depends on your tolerance for the sort of masculine galaxy-brained camp characteristic alike of Iron Maiden lyrics and Anselm Kiefer installations or, rather, on the critic’s skill in helping you move past your laughter to the hear the echoes of Milton—his famous description of the whale in Paradise Lost, but also his hilariously stupid lines like “this windie Sea of Land.” To listen to great themes orotundly invoked and feel wonder rather than giggles is not, at least for us culture-stuffed cynics so late in literary history, an easy or natural response. It is rather one for which the critic—himself always at the edge of the ridiculous, ecstatic pomposity—prepares us, breaking and remaking the poem in order to break and remake us.

Milton is at the center of Bloom’s reading of Crane. Milton meant to write a modern epic in English and so stands as an inspiration for The Bridge. More radically, the figure of Milton’s Satan reveals for Bloom the inner, trans-historical, trans-personal essence of the literary ambition that Crane felt towards Eliot and behind him towards the overfull treasury of American literary history. The fundamental “anxiety of influence,” Bloom argued—translating Bloom and Eliot’s relation into metaphysical and religious terms—is that of the created towards the creator. Its model is not, pace Eliot, homosexual (the sort of school-boy rivalry-cum-obsession familiar from A Separate Peace or The Talented Mr. Ripley) but Biblical: the Devil’s ambition to out-God God. This argument first appears in The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961), one of Bloom’s first major works, which begins with an epigraph from Crane’s final poem “The Broken Tower”:

And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind (I know not wither hurled)

But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

At the level of biographical carnality, these lines could be taken as referring to Crane’s habit of short but strongly lived affairs—both the homosexual ones that had characterized most of his adult life, and the heterosexual romance that ended (shortly after this last poem was written) with his drowning, perhaps by suicide. The “visionary company of love,” at least for the speaker of the poem, offers nothing lasting, solid, and whole.

Understood by Bloom as a statement about literary rather than erotic inspiration, this is a confession of wasted talents, unassimilated influences and disappointments in creative comradeship, all of which Crane certainly knew. The harshest critics of The Bridge—in private correspondence with him and in public reviews—were former friends of Crane’s like Allen Tate and Yvor Winters. He had not (as Eliot or Auden later would) created around himself a network of indebted sycophants, current, former or aspiring lovers, hangers-on to whom a book deal or a literary prize could be dispensed.

For Bloom, however, the “visionary company” most significantly refers to a literary family in which Crane might be placed, a line of English Romantic poets whose concerns, he would argue elsewhere, were taken up by Americans like Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens and Crane. That Crane did not talk about being an heir to Wordsworth and Shelley, or translating an English heritage to America, was not for Bloom important. He was not concerned, primarily, with understanding how a poet understood himself, but rather with assembling a set of similar ideal-types whom he could read as co-respondents to a common problem. For the English and American Romantics, Bloom insisted, the problem is at once poetic and religious, and emerges from a reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

While a dubious summary of what modern poets have been up to, Bloom’s interpretation of Milton and his supposed influence does point to two ideas that he would continue to develop in the 60s and 70s as he deepened Crane’s brief remarks on the ambiguities of literary influence into a complex historical and pseudo-theological system. First, the history of literature is essentially a history of writers trying to get out from under the overwhelming impression made on them by a preeminent ancestor—a point he would make more fully, via Freud and a great deal of vexing jargon, in The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Second, literature is essentially an anti-religion, a Satanic (Bloom would later prefer the term Gnostic) assertion of the divinity and immortality of the Self—a point he would elaborate in his catastrophically embarrassing science-fiction novel, The Flight to Lucifer (1979).The poet, crushed under his illustrious predecessors, afraid of not measuring up to their standard and terrified that he will die before creating an equally immortal work, struggles to devise a strategy for rewriting history with himself at the center. He aspires, quite seriously, to become God.

The geniuses of our literature (as Bloom knew first of all from examining his own motives) meant to become more real—as they are more real—to us than our own friends, relatives, and selves. We know, after all, the ‘real’ people around us in large part through literature (or, more likely, television); our neighbor is a Falstaff, a Bovary, etc., more than he is the empirical person next door—the literary character, and a fortiori its author is a unique, compelling, dynamic entity in a way that most of us, dreary, fungible, mediocre as we are, are not, and what apparent originality most of us have has been borrowed from our reading.

Our own lives, at their most vivid, feel like fiction, because we have been taught how to think about ourselves and what to do and who to be by the great authors who, unlike us, escape death. They and their creations live through us—they are us, which is what Bloom meant by his often-repeated apparent overstatement that “Shakespeare invented human nature.” We do not, truly, live at all; the great writers do. It is not simply that we are shorter-lived than they are, condemned to be forgotten while they are remembered. While we seem to be living our consciousness and all its contents are so secondary, trivial, and derivative, so borrowed from the geniuses we have barely understood, that we can, in comparison to them, barely be said to exist.

For Bloom, the desire to emancipate oneself from a condition of secondariness and dependency (in relation to the great achievements of the past, and, more fundamentally, in relation to God) activates literary ambition, which is, understood in its full immodesty, the wish to be God. This is also, he claimed, the principle of American life, our true national religion. We all wish, in this land of democratic egalitarian individualism, to be our own parents, invent our own systems, owe nothing to anyone. This is our vision of freedom. Americans, of course, seem to be one of the most conventionally religious peoples in the modern world, and certainly in the modern West, but the content of their faith can be reduced, Bloom held, in nearly every case to Satanic aspirations to self-authorship.

He did not usually mean this to be a condemnation of our country, although he warned on many occasions that “many non-literary lives… have wasted themselves” trying to make the plain, ordinary, unremarkable existences to which most of us are consigned by our lack of genius the biographical equivalents of brilliant works of art. Making ourselves an interesting, unique person (becoming, say, a well-curated social media presence), is for Bloom a pathetic substitute for the genuine enfranchisement accessible only to the strongest and most resolute souls. What the rest of us should do, then, seems sadly unclear.

We certainly ought not, Bloom warns, seek to escape our mediocrity through politics, which, in his account, is only another pathetic substitute for literature. “The temper of the poetic imagination is peculiarly and favorably responsive to the thwarting of political hope,” he wrote in 1966, at the beginning of the would-be revolutionary movements that began to sweep American inner cities and college campuses. If art, as Bloom understands it, is a lonely, heroic, Satanic project of freeing and transforming oneself through the unbounded exercise of imagination, then it is inherently anti-religious and anti-political—although, as he often despaired, the lifework of most critics is a busy, desperate, self-deluded effort to convince themselves and us otherwise, to pretend that the artist can be a good believer and good citizen.

The heart of Bloom’s teaching is dark. Religion, politics, and the pleasures of private life all appear as failures to heed the call of literature, which summons us to emulate Satan in his war against God. How someone with such ideas could ever have passed himself off as an avuncular educator on the side of the ‘Great Books’ against progressive multi-culturalism seems inexplicable, except that such things do keep happening, over and over. Some strange feature of the American right—perhaps simply its own intellectual vacuity—draws its would-be intellectuals to the orbit of figures who openly despise all norms and pieties conservatives ought to uphold, provided that those figures also happen to despise those of the left.

Or maybe what attracts conservatives to Bloom is less his theory of literature than his pessimism about America, his sense that nothing, at least nothing great, is possible after Crane. As he mourned in a 1994 essay, “An Elegy for the Canon,” what he took to be our national literary sterility seems to be more than a contingent or solvable problem having to do with certain features of a possibly transitory cultural moment, but to be rather a constitutive and worsening dimension of modern history.

If someone tried to write a great American poem or novel today, blending the lyrical-personal and epic-national modes to speak a truth at once unique and common, he would perhaps seem to us, how do Zoomers put it? Delusional, cringe. More likely, such an attempt would never be made, the possible artist having been diverted into, as Katherine Dee writes (meaning, reader, to be hopeful about the future of American culture!) our neo-vaudeville of Tiktok entertainment—or worse, into the neo-Chataqua of Substack commentary.

But it might not, from another vantage, seem that America lacks strenuous bards shouting into the air their personal-national odes. From William Carlos Williams’ Patterson to Laurie Anderson’s United States to Taylor Mac’s Twenty-Four Decade History of Popular Music, we have perhaps by all means rather too much of the enormous, historical, cataloging, I-Hear-America-Singing monoliths of encyclopedic ambition—not least among them Bloom’s hundred-something-volume corpus!

For Bloom himself, it seemed by the time he wrote “Elegy” that our crisis is not one of being deafened and blinded by such blustery, show-boating culture-monsters. We are rather huddled in quiet darkness as “shadows lengthen in our evening land,” witnessing the inevitable death of ambitious art and competent audiences. He was referring, with pointed indirection, to a book that had haunted Crane: Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918)—‘the West’ being called in German, ‘The Evening Lands,’ where the sun sets, and for Spengler where History terminates. Decline appeared in English in 1926, as Crane was at work on The Bridge. Its grim thesis troubled him the rest of his short life.

Spengler argued—on the basis of a theory of history by which every human culture has a thousand-year span running through the same phases and ending in a uniform imbecility followed by collapse—that the West had already completed the era in which original artistic achievement was possible. We are now entering, he declared, a decadent phase when liberal democracy and capitalism will degenerate into oligarchy—the untrammeled power of money—and then, in a movement of popular reaction, into one-man rule, “Caesarism.” Political liberty, like the intellectual and imaginative freedom of the artist, belongs to the past.

This was, in fact, true of Germany; the soon-coming miseries of Weimar and horrors of Nazism would give Spengler the aura of a prophet. But, a hundred years on, we can say—although this promises nothing about our future—that the West, especially America, still had something to look forward to in the twentieth century. Crane, though, feared that Spengler was right—and not being a critic like Eliot or Bloom, could not resign himself to living on after the death of culture. He needed, to live and to write—knowing living and writing to be the same—confidence both in his own abilities to create and in his culture’s capacities to nurture, receive and continue his work. This confidence, for a time, was supplied by Waldo Frank, who may, today, be more than Bloom the Jewish critic we, like Crane, most need.

Inspired in part by his ongoing correspondence with Crane, Frank wrote in 1927 a critique of Spengler for The Menorah Journal. He knocked over Spengler’s absurd constructions of ideal-type civilizations that descend in distinct, predictable phases. More interestingly, he observed that Spengler’s own work, although it had pretensions to scholarly objectivity, was a poetic epic in its own right, a powerful, if depressing, work of imagination that used facts with great creativity to offer a vision at once person and compelling to many members of German, European, and American culture. Spengler was a poet, disproving in his own book his diagnosis that poetry in the grand style was henceforth impossible.

Frank even implies that Spengler is a specifically Stevensian poet, echoing Stevens’ recently-published poem “The Snowman,” which begins with a call for objectivity:

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow…

Spengler, too, in his “poetic” text urges that, abandoning the reveries of art, we are now to carry out, as Frank ironized, “the work of Winter: to understand ourselves, to set down as the Seal of our glorious dying life the ruthless scrutiny of what we were.” But winter’s work and winter’s mind, however much they seem founded on the renunciation of poetry’s romantic, imaginative, creative powers in favor of austerer and more sterile knowledge, are poetry still.

Crane wrote to Frank in 1927 thanking him for his critique of Spengler, which he called “a magnificent rebuttal,” and admitting that he had let himself be “somewhat bowled over” by the German’s totalizing, self-contradicting pessimism. Four years later—as America and the world were paralyzed by economic catastrophe, and as The Bridge was attacked by critics who included some of Crane’s closest friends—he wrote to Frank, “Spengler must have been right.” The United States had no future, and thus no place for the poet. A year later, Crane was dead.

The critic is not obliged to give Crane’s final judgment on himself the greatest authority; what is most historically proximate is not what is most authoritative, nor do artists know best what to say or make of themselves. These at least are the presumptions—perhaps as Satanic as Bloom takes the poet’s inevitably to be—of criticism, which assumes we can, through the power of imagination, remake the past. But remake it, as Frank called for, in conscious freedom of our poetic making, and not in the inauthentic, pseudo-objective manner of Spengler, or with the fatalistic, Spenglerian posturing of the later Bloom. If Bloom, transformed to defender of the Literary Canon and lamenter of our barbarism, betrayed Crane by adopting the outlook of the poet’s Teutonic bogeyman, we can nevertheless still read Bloom against himself, and take heart from his own re-writing of Crane.

Bloom, as has been noted, called for The Bridge to be read in a sequence of his own devising, which put at its finale a section titled “Cape Hatteras,” which, given Bloom’s claim that The Bridge should be read, as the “last word” of American literature, makes this passage the conclusion of our national canon. It ends with Crane’s invocation of Whitman. The younger poet calls the older, in a line that would be baffling if we did not know our Spengler, “Vedic Caesar,” implying that Whitman, arch-democrat and turbo-American, is also a universal trans-cultural figure whose wisdom draws back past the limits of our historical cycle into the ancient Sanskrit texts, and whose status as our “Caesar” belies the fear of a coming political tyrant.

Our true ruler is not the future dictator but the friendly poet. America is not a self-contained culture locked in a downward motion towards destruction but, through Whitman its sage, is connected to all cultures past and possibilities future.

Hailing Whitman—to refute Spenger—thus, and hailing through him a connection to ancient spiritual sources beyond the West, Crane concludes the poem asserting that he is:

Not soon, nor suddenly,—no, never to let go

My hand

in yours,

Walt Whitman—

so—

This ending, which seems to be a loving, intimate tribute to Whitman (inaugurating a tradition that continued with Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”), in fact is a refusal of Whitman’s own demand in “Song of Myself”: Whoever you are holding me now in hand… release me and depart on your way.

Whitman repeatedly enjoined, in his poetry and political tract Democratic Vistas (which Crane read and recommended to friends), that Americans to take up the mission of emancipation from all tradition outlined by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance.” Crane, however, in a move never rightly appreciated by Bloom, rejected the Emersonian-Whitmanian cult of the self-liberated individual—and rejected in advance the Satanic American Religion that Bloom championed. Son of a kooky half-Bohemian mother taken up with Christian Science, Crane perhaps knew only too personally the dim, morbid vacuity of Americans’ self-obsessive quests for ‘inner light.’

Crane seems, in his grasping of Whitman’s hand, in his refusal to “let go” as Whitman ordered, to place himself and invite us along with him into a new relation to tradition in America, accepting the need for ancestors and moving beyond the “anxiety of influence” towards a complex stance in which our forebears’ insistence on self-reliance can be at once ironically judged (seeing how Whitman depended on Emerson, or Bloom on Crane) and admiringly appreciated as the basis for our own, more consciously dependent, late-coming, and nevertheless still original and generative, gratitude. That the last word of The Bridge, on Bloom’s rearranged reading, should be “so,” followed by a dash, invites us to think the next, hopeful words, “what now?”