') which indicates metaphorical significance for the novel's subject matter. The title, as a foretaste of Smart's poetic techniques, uses metre (it is largely anapaestic), contains words denoting exalted or intensified states (grandeur, centrality, weeping), and alludes to Psalm 137 ('By the waters of Babylon we lay down and wept. She completed the novel while working for the Ministry of Defence, which fired her after its publication. In 1943, in the midst of the Battle of the Atlantic, she sailed to England to join Barker, where she gave birth to their second child, Christopher. to support herself, her daughter, and her writing by working as a file clerk for the British embassy. Barker tried to visit her, but Smart's family ensured that he was turned back at the border for ' moral turpitude.' She moved to Washington D.C. In 1941, after becoming pregnant, Smart returned to Canada, settling in Pender Harbour, British Columbia, to have their first child, Georgina, while continuing to write the book.

Barker documented the affair in his novel The Dead Seagull (1950). In the novel, the multiple pregnancies are reduced to one, other details of the affair are omitted, and the narrator's lover is barely described, as Smart focuses on her own experience and feelings, which was rare for the male-centric literature of that day. Their affair lasted 18 years Smart bore four of the 15 children he had by four women. Smart discovered Barker's poetry-specifically his poem Daedalus-in the late 1930s in Better Books on Charing Cross Road, London. The work was inspired by Smart's passionate affair with the British poet George Barker (1913–1991). By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a 1945 novel in prose poetry by the Canadian author Elizabeth Smart (1913–1986).

By grand central station i sat down