What Inspired “The Great Figure”?
Once on a hot July day coming back exhausted from the Post Graduate Clinic, I dropped in as I sometimes did at Marsden’s studio on Fifteenth Street for a talk, a little drink maybe and to see what he was doing. As I approached his number I heard a great clatter of bells and the roar of a fire engine passing the end of the street down Ninth Avenue. I turned just in time to see a golden figure 5 on a red backkground flash by. The impression was so sudden and forceful that I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote a short poem about it.
