. . Some Notes on Hart Crane He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made available and made to pass for what they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and qualification to be the world’s interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have: but he has also what they have not,—this strong, solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of the cities to the Atlantis . . . He never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic raptures. —Emerson, “Plato” I A reading at once sophisticated and rich—of a poem as complex as The Bridge—must start with details and distinctions: the realization, perhaps, that, in Crane’s case, even if they started off one, by the end of his poem, Cathay and Atlantis do not allegorize the same notion: Cathay was the mistaken goal from which Columbus, on his first voyage to the New World, returned, and, after three more, one of which was a major colonization push with 17 ships and 1500 colonists, died unaware he had not found.
