By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept | CBC Books - Action News
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By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Elizabeth Smart's novel of prose poetry is a fictional account of the author's affair with British poet George Barker.

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.

Read an excerpt | Author interviews

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.

Author interviews

Author Elizabeth Smart reads from her book At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and talks about her life with Peter Gzowski.