Hart Crane Quotes

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

Hart Crane

#2. 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.

Hart Crane

#3. 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.

Hart Crane

#4. I can remember much forgetfulness.

Hart Crane

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

Hart Crane

#6. 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.

Hart Crane

#7. 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.

Hart Crane

#8. 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.

Hart Crane

#9. 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.

Hart Crane

#10. I cannot figure out what Dadaism is. But if the baroness is to be a keystone for it, then I think I can possibly know when it is coming and how to avoid it.

Hart Crane

#11. 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.

Hart Crane

#12. 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.

Hart Crane

#13. 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.

Hart Crane

#14. The bottom of the sea is cruel.

Hart Crane

#15. 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.

Hart Crane

#16. Love: a burnt match skating in a urinal.

Hart Crane

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

Hart Crane

#18. [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.

Hart Crane

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

Hart Crane

#20. 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.

Hart Crane

#21. 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.

Hart Crane

#22. 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.

Hart Crane