The Brooklyn Bridge opened to traffic on May 24, 1883, after 13 years under construction, and though it was admiringly described by a contemporary journalist as “a work of bare utility,” it was also viewed from the beginning as a “durable monument” of America itself. On opening day, P.T. Barnum led a herd of 21 elephants across the span to prove its strength, but the sheer sublimity of its soaring cathedral-arches and miles of glistening cable have proved as impressive as its load-bearing capacity. Engineering know-how and visionary beauty stand united in its arc.

Four decades later, during a three-month stay in America, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky stepped onto the Brooklyn Bridge “as a crazed believer enters a church.” In his awe-struck poem, “Brooklyn Bridge,” he epitomized the structure as “a paw of steel” that would bring “the seas and the prairies” into a single clasp. Mayakovsky dimly sensed what another poet of genius would exploit to the full. Only two years before, the young Hart Crane, still struggling to assemble his first collection of poems, “White Buildings,” was already planning an ambitious epic with the bridge as its tutelary symbol.

For both poets, the bridge was a metaphysical construct, linking past and future, the old world and the new, nuts-and-bolts with the grandeur of dream. For Crane, however, it was also the steel and stone embodiment of something more fragile and precarious, a kind of swaying suspension of all his hopes for America, and especially for some reconciliation between the spirit of Walt Whitman and “the stenographic smiles and stock quotations” of the modern world.

Crane grasped something deeper as well: The Brooklyn Bridge was not just a metaphor, it was metaphor itself. A metaphor is a “transfer,” a word-bridge linking far-flung entities through the intuition of hidden affinities. In this way, the span connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn could also become “harp and altar,” “multitudinous Verb,” and most famously, a “steeled Cognizance.” It conveyed imagination, that fabulous commuter, to all times and places, from Tyre and Troy to Flatbush and Times Square.

Grand as his vision was, Crane had a more urgent personal motive. In 1922, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” had appeared to mingled shock and acclaim. Crane wrote to his friend Gorham Munson that Eliot’s poem “was good, of course, but so damned dead.” He recognized its power but deplored its bleakness. In a later letter he wrote that “The Bridge” would constitute an alternative vision to Eliot’s and move “toward a more positive, or … ecstatic goal.”

It took Crane seven years but “The Bridge” was finally published in 1930 under the Boni & Liveright imprint — the same firm that had earlier brought out the American edition of “The Waste Land.” Crane didn’t dislodge Eliot, of course, but over time his work has emerged less as a riposte to his rival than as a visionary poem in its own right, arguably the greatest such work in American literature.

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to find Crane’s complete poems, his scattered prose writings, and most of his voluminous correspondence in a single volume. His “Complete Poems and Selected Letters” (The Library of America, 850 pages, $40.), edited by Langdon Hammer, is the latest addition to the wonderful Library of America series.

Despite his Dionysiac practices — the violent binges fuelled by Cutty Sark or tequila, the passionate if short-lived liaisons, often with sailors on shore-leave, the bouts of frenzied composition to the thunderous accompaniment of Ravel’s “Bolero” played at top volume on the gramophone, even the fabled vision in a dentist’s chair while under laughing gas of “The Word Made Flesh”— Crane was resolutely Apollonian in the practice of his art. However disordered their origins, his poems exhibit a consummate formal burnish.

Though Whitman remained the much-loved “camerado” of his inspiration, Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” was to be channelled into ever stricter and more euphonious measures. Against the long, loping lines of “Leaves of Grass,” with their subtle prosodic variations, Crane would set Elizabethan rigor, in this strange process of transposition turning himself into a master of the iambic line.

Without formal education and often dangerously naïve, Crane proved an astute commentator on the place of poetry and the role of the poet in the modern world. His essays and remarkable letters bear this out with great eloquence. “Complete Poems and Selected Letters” contains a detailed chronology of Crane’s life and works, biographical notices on his correspondents, and succinct but useful notes to the poems and prose. Mr. Hammer, a professor of English at Yale, has included two dozen or so previously unpublished letters in this edition. They contain no startling disclosures, but they do provide further unhappy details on that tormented, and tormenting, ménage à trois composed of Crane, his manipulative mother, and his aloof father, both of whom dragged him into their bitter battles years after their divorce.

“Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,” he wrote in “Quaker Hill.” His letters to his parents show what that curse entailed. In this personal regard, it’s probably no accident that he chose the bridge, the arc that joins sundered extremes, as his abiding symbol.

Critics have disagreed about whether “The Bridge” is a genuine “epic.” The question now seems irrelevant.In following the action of a single day, beginning with the harbor dawn and concluding at midnight on the bridge, the poem is clearly modeled in part on James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which Crane read in a smuggled copy and fervently admired. “The Bridge” is a compacted epic, a distinctively modernist genre that includes such poems as St. John Perse’s “Anabasis,” published in 1924, as well as “The Wasteland.” In these works, vast reaches of time and space are conjured with a single consciousness out of violently compressed metaphors.

The epic impulse was strong in Crane from the outset. “White Buildings” contains several lyrics that achieve the effect of vastness. In “Passage,” we read: “He closed the book. And from the Ptolemies / Sand troughed us in a glittering abyss. / A serpent swam a vertex to the sun.”And in the ambitious sequence “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” he writes:

Anchises’ navel, dripping of the sea, —
The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides…

Such glancing allusions are like shards from which whole worlds can be inferred; they are atomized epics, Iliads in haiku, but all the more suggestive for their brevity. In “The Tunnel,” the Hades section of “The Bridge,” Crane penned the line, “and love / A burnt match skating in a urinal.”Entire novels are pressed within those sad and bitter words.His most brilliant effects are thus what he called “cipher-scripts of time,” jolting the reader’s own buried realms of emotional experience back into startled life.

Crane’s exuberant optimism may no longer seem tenable. Certainly it failed him in the end; he was only 32 when on April 27, 1932, he dove to his death from the deck of the Orizaba. But Crane’s beloved Brooklyn Bridge still stands “river-throated” as on the day it was inaugurated. So too does the radiant bridge of words he spun from it. And each of them, in his words, still “whispers antiphonal in azure swing.”