Life & Wisdom Quote by Hart Crane

Crane’s line reads like a dare aimed at his own myth. He’s talking about the Brooklyn Bridge - the grand steel metaphor at the heart of The Bridge - but he refuses to let symbolism stay lofty. The bridge is “a symbol of all such poetry” he wants to write: modern, infrastructural, public-facing, stitched into American life rather than floating above it. Then he swerves: the “present fancy” that in a year he’ll be happier “working in an office.” That twist isn’t self-help optimism; it’s a pressure valve.

The intent is double-edged. Crane is trying to will stability into existence, to imagine a future where art and ordinary labor don’t have to be sworn enemies. The subtext is how hard that reconciliation is for him. “Fancy” is doing the work of a wink and a flinch: he doesn’t quite believe the fantasy he’s offering. The sentence carries the weary knowledge that his chosen symbol - a bridge that joins, spans, synthesizes - is also an accusation. If the bridge stands for connection, continuity, and purpose, then his own life, with its financial precarity and emotional volatility, stands for the opposite.

Context matters: Crane is writing in a moment when modernism is rewriting what poetry can sound like, and when “serious” art increasingly required patrons, hustling, or day jobs. He’s not renouncing poetry; he’s exposing the cost of making it. The bridge becomes both his aesthetic program and his coping mechanism: an engineered promise that things can be held together, even when the builder can’t.