And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another.

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.