Quotes by Hart Crane
The bottom of the sea is cruel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I got so I simply gagged everytime I sat before my desk to write an ad.
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.
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath An embassy.
Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh, O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone....
The stars have grooved our eyes with old persuasions Of love and hatred, birth,—surcease of nations . . .
To course that span of consciousness thou'st named The Open Road—thy vision is reclaimed!...
