Hart Crane Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

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
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
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.

Hart Crane
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,

Hart Crane
Stars scribble on our eyes the frosty sagas,
The gleaming cantos of unvanquished space.

Hart Crane
And biased by full sails, meridians reel Thy purpose — still one shore beyond desire! The sea's green crying towers a-sway, Beyond.

Hart Crane
There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

Hart Crane
High in the azure steeps Monody shall not wake the mariner. This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

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

Hart Crane
And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings.

Hart Crane
Ah, madame! truly it's not right
When one isn't the real Gioconda,
To adapt her methods and deportment
For snaring the poor world in a blue funk.

Hart Crane
Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks, A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene.

Hart Crane
We left the haven hanging in the night –
Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel.
Pacific here at time's end, bearing corn. –
Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel.

Hart Crane
Slagged of the hurricane—I, cast within its flow, Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant. You have given me the shell, Satan,—carbonic amulet Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.

Hart Crane
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.

Hart Crane
So the 20th Century—so
whizzed the Limited—roared by and left
three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly
watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slipping
gimleted and neatly out of sight.

Hart Crane
But the star-glistered salver of infinity, The circle, blind crucible of endless space, Is sluiced by motion, — subjugated never.

Hart Crane
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
Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam
Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring
When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam
Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping!
…My hand
in yours,
Walt Whitman—
so—

Hart Crane
We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

Hart Crane
We have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can.

Hart Crane
The phonographs of hades in the brain Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love A burnt match skating in a urinal —

Hart Crane
And why do I often meet your visage here,
Your eyes like agate lanterns—on and on Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?
And did their riding eyes right through your side,
And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?
And Death, aloft—gigantically down
Probing through you—toward me, O evermore!

Hart Crane
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Hart Crane
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
You who desired so much—in vain to ask—
Yet fed your hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest—
Achieved that stillness ultimately best,
Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear!

Hart Crane
Dinners, soirées, poets, erratic millionaires, painters, translations, lobsters, absinthe, music, promenade, oysters, sherry, aspirin, pictures, Sapphic heiresses, editors, books, sailors. And How!

Hart Crane
And through that cordage, threading with its call
One arc synoptic of all tides below –
Their labyrinthine mouths of history
Pouring reply as though all ships at sea
Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry, –
'Make thy love sure – to weave whose song we ply!'

Hart Crane
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Hart Crane