“Afoot again, and onward without halt—

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

My hand

in yours,

Walt Whitman—

so—”

It is a near-impossible task to adopt the mantle of Whitman, yet Hart Crane offered himself as tribute when he penned “The Bridge” in 1930. Though critics are less convinced of “The Bridge” as they are of “Leaves of Grass,” most conversations about Crane identify him as a major successor of Whitman. Crane’s role was to update Whitman’s work for a modern age, and in the words of Waldo Frank, Crane was “a child of modern man.” More than what they share in “living brotherhood” (Crane’s words), I am interested in the chasm between Whitman and Crane.

Writing to a friend, Crane described his project as “a mythical synthesis of America.” Initially, this may not seem quite different from Whitman’s conception of America as “the greatest poem,” but their visions could not be more distinct. Fundamentally, Whitman is concerned with the American people—they are the poem that must be documented by the American poet. The major players of Crane’s poem are rarely contemporary and nameless as in Whitman’s writing; instead, he is proffering a monumental myth of the past.

Familiar faces populate “The Bridge.” The ground below our feet becomes Pocahontas’s flesh; Captain John Smith of the Jamestown colony marches past, “all beard and certainty;” Edgar Allen Poe materializes in the window reflections of the subway; the Wright brothers swoop overhead; Rip Van Winkle strolls confusedly down Broadway, rubbing his eyes and asking the passerby if he is in Sleepy Hollow (notably, Crane is conflating two classic Washington Irving tales here; Van Winkle did not live in Sleepy Hollow where the Headless Horseman rode). Crane’s invocation of Washington Irving is essential to his mythmaking, as Irving is perhaps the father of American mythmaking. Stories of his that we are all familiar with, like “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” were introduced to the public through a deceptive scheme intended to convince the audience of their verity.

Writing under a pseudonym, Irving attributed the stories to a fictional historian named Dietdrich Knickerbocker, insinuating that they were steeped in historical truth. Because of this murky origin, these stories straddle the line between literature and legend. Though he is upfront about his mythmaking, Crane is following Irving’s example.

Regardless of his continuation of Irving’s craft, Crane’s monumentalizing of historical figures is incompatible with Whitman’s idea of the American poet and his work itself. “Most works are most beautiful without ornament,” Whitman writes in his preface to “Leaves of Grass.” “Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.” Reading “Leaves of Grass,” it becomes clear that Whitman follows his own advice and actively avoids this monumental approach. He is concerned foremost with his contemporaries, no matter how monumental or minute. Even when he writes of the president or other grand figures, he does not name them. Everyone is faceless, ensuring that his work is unmarked by time.

For this reason, I do not believe that Crane is a tried-and-true continuation of Whitman, even if that is how Crane saw himself. More so, Crane is redefining Whitman’s mission based on a need for American myth. Fulfilling this aim, Whitman becomes a myth in Crane’s pantheon, too.

I have spent enough time on Whitman. Let me proceed to the structure of Crane’s bridge—the Brooklyn Bridge, to be precise. On the surface, the Brooklyn Bridge is a clear representation of modern America—a hallmark of American industrial ingenuity. But beyond the physical bridge, Crane’s project is meant to be a bridge itself: a passageway that connects “tomorrows into yesteryear.”

What preoccupies me about Crane’s structure is not his bridge but the river that runs below it. This river is the river of time, “tortured with history” and “poised wholly on its dream” of our nation. Addressing us, he asks: “What are you, lost within this tideless spell?” When writing of the river, Crane is preoccupied with the wayward hobos that would wait along the tracks behind his father’s cannery. Though their aimlessness is somewhat childish to him, he writes:

“Yet they touch something like a key perhaps.

From pole to pole across the hills, the states

— They know a body under the wide rain;

Youngsters with eyes like fjords, old reprobates

With racetrack jargon—dotting immensity

They lurk across her, knowing her yonder breast

Snow-silvered, sumac-stained or smoky blue—

Is past the valley-sleepers, south or west.”

The hobo is the American flâneur. There is something innately aristocratic about the flâneur—the fashionable man with the time to roam the streets of a city and observe the life around him, both a part of the crowd and a separate entity. Unlike the flâneur, the hobo has no class status to stand on. He lives a nomadic life, hopping trains and loitering by the tracks in transient towns. But in his travels, he observes all aspects of America—most importantly its vastness. The thousands of miles of uninhabited land only traversed by the iron rails and seen by few are his to conquer.

I believe that Charles Baudelaire’s definition of the flâneur in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” applies to the hobo as it does the flâneur. He writes, “For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.”

Yes, Crane’s hobo is lost within the chaos of the river’s “tideless spell,” but his disconnection and aimlessness provide a unique power of observation. As Baudelaire writes, he sees the world and yet is unseen by it. He is our witness. More than any of his monumental mythmaking, I believe that his identification of this critical American figure—the hobo—is Crane’s great contribution.