O sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, / Onto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

The Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point. New York: The Library of America. In a 1991 interview with Antonio Weiss of The Paris Review the literary critic Harold Bloom talked about how Crane along with William Blake initially sparked his interest in literature at a very young age:

I was preadolescent ten or eleven years old.

In his most ambitious work The Bridge Crane sought to write an epic poem in the vein of The Waste Land that expressed a more optimistic view of modern urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. Harold Hart Crane (July 21 1899 – April 27 1932) was an American poet.