It was also a relationship that Smart would document in her 1945 work By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – a novel that straddled poetry and prose and garnered a cult following. What followed was by any standards an extraordinary relationship, a mingling of love and infatuationplayed out across continents, carrying the pair from California to London, from rural Ireland to Essex, taking in breakups, reunions, poverty and the glorious mayhem of the Soho scene along the way. Although they had yet to meet, although he was still only words on a page, she declared him the love of her life. "It is the juicy sound that runs, bubbles over, that intoxicates til I can hardly follow," she wrote in her diary of that first encounter. Thousands of miles away, Barker was teaching at a university in Japan at the time, but that day in Better Books, on London's Charing Cross Road, Smart came across his poem Daedalus and was instantly smitten. I t was in a bookshop that Elizabeth Smart first fell in love with George Barker.
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