The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.

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.