A hymn of praise to the Brooklyn Bridge, Mayakovsky’s poem (Bruklinskii Most) expresses the awe that he, as an artist and a technophile, feels when he experiences the sight of this symbol of New York City and American ingenuity. The work, written and recited in New York before its publication in the Soviet Union, is unusual among his American poems in that its focus is not the condemnation of capitalism, although a few hints of criticism appear in the poem.
It begins with a jocular call for Calvin Coolidge—who was the U.S. president when Mayakovsky visited the country in 1925—to share the poet’s amazement at this web of metal so breathtaking that even a fervent Russian communist, an enemy of the United States and of capitalism, must pay it tribute.
Mayakovsky’s offering is a single long stanza of 169 lines, in sequentially indented patterns, some lines only one word long, with occasional rhymes. The poet conveys a nearly thunderstruck fascination with the structure that towers over the East River, with one footing in Manhattan and another in Brooklyn. The engineering wonder also pulls together the various parts of the United States and allows the Old World entry into the New.
In addition to being of utilitarian design, the bridge possesses a dazzling style that epitomizes the futurist aesthetic of a union of function and grace; in it the poet sees his own artistic visions realized. The bridge inspires the same feelings in him as those experienced by a worshipper entering a magnificent church or a painter viewing an exquisite masterpiece.
This impressive work—the bridge itself—dwarfs every other technological wonder in the city, and after the inevitable destruction of Western civilization, the remnants of the Brooklyn Bridge will be the dinosaur bones from which future geologists will reconstruct our age.
Although the speaker acknowledges that no one will ever know the true sufferings of the laborers who erected the bridge (and from which the unemployed now commit suicide), he remains proud to have become a part of its history and continues to wonder at it in slangy amazement.
Works Cited
Brown, Edward J. Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution. Princeton University Press, 1973.
Haw, Richard. The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History. Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. Edited by Patricia Davis, translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey, Indiana University Press, 1960.