The Seba library treats Brooklyn Bridge in 7 passages, across 2 authors (including Bloom, Harold, Kerényi, Karl).
Hart Crane, lifelong homosexual... sought his bride in the vaulting movement of Brooklyn Bridge. The search of Crane's brief American epic is for a composite of Eve, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the Whitmanian mother
Bloom argues that Brooklyn Bridge serves as the erotic and spiritual object of Crane's epic quest, functioning simultaneously as bride, mother-figure, and gateway to the mythic Atlantis.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis
O harp and altar, of the fury fused... Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry
The 'To Brooklyn Bridge' proem is read as an aesthetically perfect lyric in which the Bridge is apostrophized as sacred instrument, prophetic threshold, and vessel of mystical ascent from Hades to dawn.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis
Ruskin might have been startled by the aggressive 'pathetic fallacy' of Brooklyn Bridge's cognizance, a knowing that is its leap of covenant between past and future.
Bloom reads the Bridge's 'steeled Cognizance' in Atlantis as a prime instance of the American Sublime, wherein the structure achieves anthropomorphic knowing and covenantal agency between temporal realms.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015thesis
The most eminent are by Whitman and Hart Crane, who was cognizant that Brooklyn Ferry had been replaced by the Brooklyn Bridge.
Bloom establishes Brooklyn Bridge as Crane's deliberate supersession of Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' positioning the Bridge as the next stage in the American poetic mythology of New York.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
the quest of The Bridge is for a bride who might as well be Shelley's Platonic white radiance of eternity. Gently yet with plangency, Crane concentrates this whiteness as emanating fr
Bloom aligns the Bridge-as-bride with the Shelleyan Platonic ideal, arguing that Crane's erotic-spiritual longing finds its correlative in an unattainable white radiance rather than any human beloved.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
After the Pentecostal Passion and Hosannas that conclude The River, the daemon responds with the painful and superb The Tunnel, Crane's Virgilian journey into Avernus.
In the compositional logic Bloom traces, the Bridge frames both apocalyptic ascent and Virgilian descent, with the subway tunnel serving as the infernal counterpart to the Bridge's celestial arc.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
if you will let Kerényi get away with a statement like that—and I hope you will—you will end up owning the Brooklyn Bridge.
The prefatory commentator invokes the Brooklyn Bridge idiomatically to signal rhetorical credulity, cautioning that Kerényi's mythological sleight-of-hand requires a suspension of strict logical proof.
, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944aside