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.And upat the right Brooklyn Bridge, the most superb piece of construc-tion in the modern world, I m sure, with strings of light crossingit like glowing worms as the Ls and surface cars pass each othergoing and coming.It is particularly fine to feel the greatest cityin the world from enough distance, as I do here, to see its largerproportions (190).Seen in its  larger proportions, New York presented Cranewith a sublime vision of the strength and promise of modernityhe felt the more cynical Eliot lacked the spiritual strength tobring into his poetry.The vista Crane describes in the letterinforms the poem with which the epic begins,  Proem: ToBrooklyn Bridge. In it Crane presents the goal of the epic questthrough American history, geography, and legend that the restof the poem will elaborate  to lend a myth to God. Crane isnot insensible to the wearying and potentially destructiveaspects of life in New York, however, and the poem shifts backand forth in its first half dozen stanzas between these negativequalities and notions of transcendence.The poem opens withthe image of a seagull  shedding white rings of tumult buildinghigh/Over the chained bay waters Liberty, but this vision offreedom vanishes as the workaday routine of the city takes overand  elevators drop us from our day. Similarly, a descriptionof the  panoramic sleights of cinemas, which figure in Crane sview as modern versions of Plato s cave, are placed in contrast tothe Brooklyn Bridge, which is addressed directly,  across theharbor, silver-paced/As though the sun took step of thee, yetTHE JAZZ AGE AND 109THE GREAT DEPRESSIONleft/Some motion ever unspent in they stride. The disorientingpace of life among the city s multitudes is figured in the imageof an apparently suicidal  bedlamite :  Out of some subwayscuttle, cell or loft/A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,/Tiltingthere momently, shrill shirt ballooning,/A jest falls from thespeechless caravan. In the magnificent concluding stanzas ofthe poem Crane represents the bridge as a symbol of the inte-grative power of the imagination: he implores the bridge, pos-sessed of a  swift/Unfractioned idiom, to  sweep down to  uslowliest and  of the curveship lend a myth to God (Simon43 44).F.SCOTT FITZGERALDLike Crane, F.Scott Fitzgerald came to New York from theMidwest, and also like Crane, Fitzgerald came to know inti-mately the self-destructive tendencies the city of the 1920s, withits fast-paced party life, could set in motion.But Fitzgerald snovels and essays, like Crane s letters, speak eloquently to theallure and promise embodied in the city in something very likethe  idiom Crane proposed to invent to capture the feel of jazzin words  clean, sparkling, elusive. Fitzgerald might have hadCrane s poems in mind when in his classic essay of 1932,  MyLost City, he describes how the vision of the city struck him ashe returned to it after a three-year absence:  As the ship glidedup the river, the city burst thunderously upon us in the earlydusk the white glacier of lower New York swooping down likea strand of a bridge to rise into uptown New York, a miracle offoamy light suspended by the stars (The Crack-Up 29 30).Fitzgerald was born in St.Paul, Minnesota, in 1896.Heattended Princeton University and served in the armed forcesduring World War I.He met Zelda Sayre, who would becomehis wife, while stationed in Montgomery, Alabama.From tripsinto and through New York during the 1910s, while Fitzgeraldwas an undergraduate, he developed a taste for the pageantryand drama the city seemed to offer:  I had come only to stare atthe show, though the designers of the Woolworth Building and110 NEW YORKthe Chariot Race Sign, the producers of musical comedies andproblem plays, could ask for no more appreciative spectator, forI took the style and glitter of New York even above its own valu-ation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]