W.H. Auden and Thomas Wolfe In Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn Heights is one of New York’s best preserved and most attractive nineteenth–century historic districts. Those interested in literature may wish to peek at two buildings on Montague Terrace, which is a small side street just before the Promenade, at the end of Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. Plaques on two buildings commemorate famous writers who once lived in them: W.H. Auden and Thomas Wolfe.

Esteemed 20th century poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973) lived at One Montague Terrace in Brooklyn Heights for a brief time circa 1939-1940.

He wrote his long philosophical poem "New Year Letter" at this address.

"And love illuminates again

The city and the lion's den

The world's great rage, the travel of young men."

~ W. H. Auden from the poem "New Year Letter"

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."

~ W. H. Auden from the poem Squares and Oblongs

An unusual window box motif of praying angels outside One Montague Terrace.

American author Thomas Wolfe lived in Brooklyn Heights from 1931 to 1939 and at 5 Montague Terrace from 1933 - 1939 where he wrote the novel " Of Time And The River."

"Great God the only bridge, the bridge of power, life, and joy, the bridge that was a span, a cry, an ecstasy --that was America."

~ Thomas Wolfe

This is the entrance to the building Wolfe lived in.

A panoramic view of the Montague terrace buildings.

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being — the reward he seeks — the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity. " ~ Thomas Wolfe from the novel "Of Time And The River."

Reading the passage above convinced me that is why we keep a blog -- for the reward of recording life -- a kernel of eternity.