To Brooklyn Bridge Themes

"To Brooklyn Bridge" is basically an ode, and awe and amazement kind of go with the territory of odes. Crane is very consciously channeling the grizzled old spirit of Walt Whitman here, specificall...

Crane fits in with a whole category of people who are described as "spiritual but not religious." His spirituality seems roughly in line with the twin 19th century currents of British Romanticism a...

While "To Brooklyn Bridge" doesn't deal with much of America outside New York City, Crane seems to think that New York could almost represent America as a whole. It's the city of the future, full o...

The Bridge (which contains "To Brooklyn Bridge") is sometimes compared with T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. Both poems treat the gritty realities of 20th century life with an epic scope. Along the way, bo...

Is it strange that the most fleshed-out character in this poem is a stone bridge? As for the rest of the people of New York, they seem more like a mass of suits or rags, a crush of traffic lights,...