Hart Crane

“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.”

“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 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 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.”

“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 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.”

“Voyages IIIInfinite consanguinity it bears This tendered theme of you that light Retrieves from sea plains where the sky Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones; While ribboned water lanes I wind Are laved and scattered with no stroke Wide from your side, whereto this hour The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands. And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise, Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave unto Your body rocking! and where death, if shed, Presumes no carnage, but this single change,- Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song; Permit me voyage, love, into your hands . .”

“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.”