By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: February 6, 2017 8:45 PM | Last Updated: February 23, 2017
Elizabeth Smart
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a novel of prose poetry, and is widely considered to be one of the form's most influential works. A fictionalized account of Elizabeth Smart's affair with British poet George Barker, the book is rhapsodic and intensely lyrical in celebrating a great love — and expressing the anguish of losing it.
From the book
"Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. And if she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no-one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me. For I am utterly collapsed. I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness.
All people seem criminally irrelevant. I ignore everyone and everything, and, if crossed or interrupted in my decay, hate. Nature is only the irking weather and flowers crude reminders of stale states of being."
From By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart ©1945. Published by HarperCollins Publishers.