Mike Liu Prof. Schoenberger WR 100 BB IL 21 Sept.

2011 In an essay titled, The Significance of Frank OHara, Charles Altieri writes about the poetry of urban spaces: Presence in the city is antithetical to presence in nature. City details after all have neither meaning, hierarchy, nor purpose not created absolutely by man. And more important, the city is committed to perpetual change; there are no enduring seasonal motifs or patterns of duration underlying and sustaining the multiplicity of city phenomena. They exist completely in the moment. (93) Should his statement have referred only to aesthetic distance, Altieri would be inarguably correct; but poetry, as much as poets, is never so rigid. Are structures of steel and brick indifferent to rain and sun? Does snow not collect on rooftops and windowsills? The passage of time applies to the urban as well as the rural. In Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge by Hart Crane, he experiments with a juxtaposition between the grace of nature and the grandeur of the city. Through the clashing diction and ethereal tone, Crane transcends the aesthetic distance into the divine. Throughout the poem, Crane plays with psychic distance, going from the seagulls wings (2) to the elevator and cinema, then out to the view of the [Brooklyn Bridge], across the harbor (13), and back into the subway scuttle (17). This measure of disorientation creates the effect of motion and therefore time, though Crane evidently mentions the actual time of day, such as noon (21), afternoon (23), and indirectly defines the night in later stanzas with stars (34), shadow (37).

Time is also shifted through the archaic language as well as references to biblical eras. While the length of the poem causes unavoidable difficulties in depicting an actual transition, the contrast is easily perceivable, and rather shocking to read in conjunction with its modern, industrial context.

Within the diction itself, excluding its archaic origin, examples of dynamic personification and even verbs are abundant; indeed, Crane narrates the entirety of the poem in present tense.