Quotes from Hart Crane

It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.

And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

I got so I simply gagged everytime I sat before my desk to write an ad.

I think the sea has thrown itself upon me and been answered, at least in part, and I believe I am a little changed - not essentially, but changed and transubstantiated as anyone is who has asked a question and been answered.

Love: a burnt match skating in a urinal.

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.

The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.

And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

Let my lusts be my ruin, then, since all else is a fake and a mockery.

And biased by full sails, meridians reelThy purpose—still one shore beyond desire!The sea's green crying towers a-sway, Beyond.

High in the azure steepsMonody shall not wake the mariner.This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

The phonographs of hades in the brainAre tunnels that re-wind themselves, and loveA burnt match skating in a urinal—

Slagged of the hurricane—I, cast within its flow,Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant.You have given me the shell, Satan,—carbonic amuletSere of the sun exploded in the sea.

And yet this great wink of eternity,Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings.

We make our meek adjustments,Contented with such random consolationsAs the wind depositsIn slithered and too ample pockets.

And why do I often meet your visage here,Your eyes like agate lanterns—on and onBelow the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?And did their riding eyes right through your side,And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?And Death, aloft—gigantically downProbing through you—toward me, O evermore!

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene.

O, I have known metallic paradisesWhere cuckoos clucked to finchesAbove the deft catastrophes of drums.While titters hailed the groans of deathBeneath gyrating awnings I have seenThe incunabula of the divine grotesque.

The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.

It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.