"It is the symbol at the threshold, and of course is largely taken from the great work that Francis Thompson did. That was his own plight. I felt his own search for spiritual identity recaptured it in the adult experience… his lost cause is very much like the plight of the knowing, intelligent and sensitive man today who cannot quite reconcile himself to institutional practice, but at the same time is in need of spiritual experience and desires, and he is caught in the limbo and a kind of suspended, neutral position of desiring and not ever attaining. That was exactly the position of Thompson." 

[Theodore Roszak Interview by James Elliott, 1956, p. 24]