Hart Crane Quotes

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
― Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of

“Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word 'myth' only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.”
― Adam Kirsch

“Coincidences undeniably imply meaning.

I am rereading Hart Crane.
I notice the date
On which he stepped off that boat
Was April 26.

Tomorrow is April 26.

The year of his suicide was 1932.
I was four.
I am now fifty-one.
One undeniable implication in this case then
Is that the year, today,
Is 1979.

Afterward, Crane’s mother scrubbed floors.
Eventually, I may or may not
Jump overboard.

Are there questions?”
― David Markson, Collected Poems

“He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.

Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich

“He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have: but he has also, what they have not.--this strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of cities to the Atlantis.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“een hart op leeftijd verdraagt niet zoveel breken.”
― Griet Op de Beeck, Gij nu