Hart Crane Quotes

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.

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.

Love: a burnt match skating in a urinal.

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree, The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins, Holding her to the sky and its quick blue, Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight. She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

Goodbye, everybody! (Suicide note)

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.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

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.

Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas, The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space. (Cape Hatteras

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

[The essences of things] are suspended on the invisible dimension whose vibrance has been denied the human eye at all times save in the intuition of ecstasy.

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.

There are several more careers more engaging to follow than that of poetry. But the circumstances of one's birth, the conduct of one's parents, the current economic structure of society, and a thousand other local factors have as much or more to say about successions to such occupations, the naive volitions of the poet to the contrary.

I cannot figure out just what Dadaism is beyond an insane jumble of the four winds, the six senses, and plum pudding. But if the Baroness is to be a keystone for it, — then I think I can possibly know when it is coming and avoid it.

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.

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.

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.