Literature is less a matter of answers than of finely rendered questions, less about solutions than deftly explored problems. Or rather, answers and solutions, to the extent that they arrive, are hidden in the rendering and the exploring.

Henry James's The Europeans, his fourth of 19 novels and one which his brother William deemed “thin and empty,” presents its central thematic opposition with a simplicity and literalness characteristic of his early period: two Europeans show up to their cousins’ Massachusetts home, and the two branches of this family come to represent two ways of life, which map quite neatly onto Epicureanism and Puritanism, a life of pleasure, indulgence, art, and participation in society on the one hand, and on the other, a life of discipline, repentance, piety, and asceticism—a world where duty outweighs desire.

The “proem” to Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” also works along two axes. The poem begins with a vision of a seagull, whose wings will the poet says, "dip and pivot,” "shedding white rings of tumult" with “inviolate curve.” This image cluster establishes a logic of circularity, chaos, and flux (pivots, rings, curves, tumult). This messy circularity contrasts ironically with the seagulls ultimate effect of "building high… Liberty."

Human beings and the structures they make for a sharp contrast with the seagulls. They seem to follow a logic that is neither circular nor liberatory. To the seagulls upward spiral is contrasted the downward plummeting of people off of or within the structures they create: "elevators drop us from our day," and a madman (“Bedlamite”) “falls from the speechless caravan," or “thy parapets”—that is, from the Brooklyn Bridge—presumably to his death. Human beings are, like the seagull, "building high" (in the form of bridge and skyscraper), but with utterly different results.

Both technologies, therefore have an import within the poem distinctly at odds with their ordinary function (faster or more convenient transport). The bridge, most centrally, is "harp and altar”; this may refer in part to the bridge’s array of cables, which resemble the strings on a harp. But the double predicate also refers to the bridge both as an "instrument" of industrial society and a symbolic site of sacrifice. In very few words, the poem seems to suggest that technological progress goes hand-in-hand with some form of compensatory loss.

Crane, in effect, "gives the lie" to James's more mannered caricature of America, insisting that American life (in particular its focus on material progress) is tragic as such, not just insofar as it requires a choice between two valid or appealing ways of life. For Crane the Romantic, American advancement constitutes a "threshold," as he calls the bridge, a pushing-outward that implies a leaving-behind. In James’ prose romance, America is no industrial behemoth, but a fledgling civilization whose limitation is its candor and immaturity.