Quotes from Hart Crane

Damp tonnage and alluvial march of days…Tortured with history, its one will—flow!

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.

The swift red flesh, a winter king—Who squired the glacier woman down the sky?She ran the neighing canyons all the spring;She spouted arms; she rose with maize—to die.

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.

Love: a burnt match skating in a urinal.

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands...

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.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

O sleepless as the river under thee, / Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod, / Onto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And all through the sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

There are no stars tonight but those of memory.

And as the bandage knot was tightened The two men smiled into each other's eyes.

It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward.

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower… The commodious, tall decorum of that sky Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits The agile precincts of the lark's return; Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing In single chrysalis the many twain — Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom — Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time's realm As love strikes clear direction for the helm

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty— Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; —Till elevators drop us from our day ...

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower; And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score Of broken intervals … And I, their sexton slave!

Forgetfulness is like a song That, freed from beat and measure, wanders. Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled, Outspread and motionless, -- A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly. Forgetfulness is rain at night, Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child. Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree, And it may stun the sybil into prophecy, Or bury the Gods. I can remember much forgetfulness.

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

The siren of the springs of guilty song— Let us take her on the incandescent wax Striated with nuances, nervosities That we are heir to

There's nothing like this in the world,' you say, knowing I cannot touch your hand and look too, into that godless cleft of sky where nothing turns but dead sands flashing. '--And never to quite understand!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning, A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Your primary presumption that The Bridge was proffered as an epic has no substantial foundation. You know quite well that I doubt that our present stage of cultural development is so ordered yet as to provide the means or method for such an organic manifestation as that.

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.