… [I]t is in the sequence’s final poem, "Atlantis," that Crane attempts his most ecstatic readerly marriage, and that section also is informed by the ideological constraints of gender I have been discussing here. As John Irwin has pointed out (in "Hart Crane’s Logic of Metaphor"), the real bridge in Brooklyn with which the poem began becomes by the conclusion of the text a completely metaphorical bridge, symbolic not only of all those bridges between people and time that the epic has attempted to build but also of the very act of creation and imagination. The bridge in "Atlantis" becomes a metaphor for metaphor, and the entire text threatens to collapse into obscurity under the burden of this textual weight. …

… Crane’s verbal experimentation constricts upon language until finally meaning is subsumed in the reader’s inability to locate a single, stable referent for the text. … Crane simply cannot say what he means, nor can he say what he means simply.