Robert Lowell Quotes

If youth is a defect, it is one that we outgrow too soon.

— Robert Lowell

“We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.”

— Robert Lowell

“I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can't cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I've never thought there was any choice for me about writing poetry. No doubt if I used my head better, ordered my life better, worked harder etc., the poetry would be improved, and there must be many lost poems, innumerable accidents and ill-done actions. But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.”

— Robert Lowell

The dead season when wolves live off the wind.

— Robert Lowell

“I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky,
They purpose nothing but their ease and die
Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;”

— Robert Lowell

“Some morbidity in me attracts mosquitoes”

— Robert Lowell

“And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.”

— Robert Lowell

“How fine our distinctions when we cannot choose”

— Robert Lowell

“Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.”

— Robert Lowell

“Sylvia Plath"
A miniature mad talent? Sylvia Plath,
who'll wipe off the spit of your integrity,
rising in the saddle to slash at Auschwitz,
life tearing this or that, I am a woman?
Who'll lay the graduate girl in marriage,
queen bee, naked, unqueenly, shaming her shame?
Each English major saying, "I am Sylvia,
I hate marriage, I must hate babies."
Even men have a horror of giving birth,
mother-sized babies splitting us in half,
sixty thousand American infants a year,
U.I.D., Unexplained Infant Deaths,
born physically whole and hearty, refuse to live,
Sylvia ... the expanding torrent of your attack.”

— Robert Lowell

“Her German language made my arteries harden-
I've no annuity for the play we blew.
I chartered an aluminum canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden.”

— Robert Lowell

“F we see light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.”

— Robert Lowell

Reading Myself
Like thousands I took just pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire
somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus ...
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work live long
enough for the sweet tooth bear to desecrate
this open book..my open coffin

— Robert Lowell

Eating Out Alone"
The loneliness inside me is a place,
Harvard where no one might always be someone.
When we're alone people we run from change
to the mysterious and beautiful
I am eating alone at a small white table,
visible, ignored ... the moment that tries the soul,
an explorer going blind in polar whiteness.
Yet everyone who is seated is a lay,,
or Paul Claudel, at the next table declaiming:
"L'Academie Groton, eh, c'est une ecole des cochons."
He soars from murdered English to killing French,
no word unheard, no sentence understood
a vocabulary to mortify Racine ...
the minotaur steaming in a maze of eloquence

— Robert Lowell

“In the American Grain"
"Ninth grade, and bicycling the Jersey highways:
I am a writer. I was half-wasp already,
I changed my shirt and trousers twice a day.
My poems came back ... often rejected, though never
forgotten in New York, this Jewish state
with insomniac minorities.
I am sick of the enlightenment:
what Wall Street prints, the mafia distributes;
when talent starves in a garret, they buy the garret.
Bill Williams made less than Band-Aids on his writing,
he could never write the King's English of The New Yorker.
I am not William Carlos Williams. He
knew the germ on every flower, and saw
the snake is a petty, rather pathetic creature.”

— Robert Lowell

“The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.”

— Robert Lowell

“History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had -
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.”

— Robert Lowell

“If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.”

— Robert Lowell

“Sleeper in the Valley
The river sings and cuts a hole in the meadow,
madly hooking white tatters on the rushes.
light escalades the strong hills. The small
valley bubbles with sunbeams like a beerglass.
The young conscript bareheaded and open-mouthed,
his neck cooling in the blue watercress;
he's sleeping. The grass soothes his heaviness,
the sunlight is raining in his green bed,
baking away the aches of his body. He smiles,
as a sick child might smile himself asleep.
O Nature, rock him warmly, he is cold.
The fields no longer make his hot eyes weep.
He sleeps in the sun, a hand on his breast lies open,
at peace. He has two red holes in his left side.”

— Robert Lowell

“Tockytock, tockytock
clumped our Alpine, Edwardian cuckoo clock,
slung with strangled, wooden game.”

— Robert Lowell

One universe, one body ... in this urn
the animal night sweats of the spirit burn

— Robert Lowell

“The black hardrubber bathtub stopper at the Parker house.”

— Robert Lowell

Dearest I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear.

— Robert Lowell

“Painter"
"I said you are only keeping me here
in the hospital, lying to my parents
and saying I am madder than I am,
because you only want to keep me here,
squeezing my last dollar to the pennies
I'm saner than anyone in the hospital.
I had to say what every madman says
a black phrase, the sleep of reason mothers monsters ...
When I am painting the canvas is a person;
all I do, each blot and line's alive,
when I am finished, it is shit on the canvas ...
But in his sketches more finished than his oils,
sketches made after he did those masterpieces,
constable can make us see the breeze ...”

— Robert Lowell

Monkeys"
"You can buy cooler, more humdrum pets
a monkey deprived of his mother in the cradle
feels the want of her affection so keenly
he either pines away or masters you
by literally hanging on your neck
no ounce of your patience or courage is misplaced;
the worst is his air of boredom and neglect,
manifested in tail-chewing and fur plucking.
The whole species is vulnerable to killing colds,
likes straw, hay or bits of a torn blanket,
a floortray thinly covered with sawdust,
they need trapezes, shelves, old rubber tires
any string or beam will do to set them swinging
these charming youngsters tend to sour with age

— Robert Lowell

“Would you like me to write Mrs. Ames about inviting you to Yaddo? Get Miss Moore to write too. You can't invite yourself, though, of course, almost all the invitations are planned. It would be marvelous to have you there. I know the solitude that gets too much. It doesn't drug me, but I get fantastic and uncivilized.
At last my divorce [from Jean Stafford] is over. It's funny at my age to have one's life so much in and on one's hands. All the rawness of learning, what I used to think should be done with by twenty-five. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing-I suppose that's what vocation means-at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I'm thankful, and call it good, as Eliot would say.”

— Robert Lowell

What we love we are.

— Robert Lowell

“Grass Fires"
No ease for the boy at his keyhole,
his telescope,
when the women's white bodies flashed
in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.
In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother's coffin
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL
The corpse
was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil
Father's death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
his last words to Mother were:
"I feel awful."
He smiled his oval Lowell smile ...
It has taken me the time since you died
to discover you are as human as I am ...
If I am.”

— Robert Lowell

“In it, he pushed the metric of typewriter spaces, and quoted from a poem, "The Catholic Bells," to show us Williams's "mature style at fifty"! This was a memorable phrase, and one that made maturity seem possible, but a long way off. I more or less memorized "The Catholic Bells," and spent months trying to console myself by detecting immaturities in whatever Williams had written before he was fifty.”

— Robert Lowell

“I appear to be embarked on the turbid waters of poetry and scholarship. And a career in poetry and knowledge is as hard to guide as Plato's horses. On the one hand I must range about discovering the fundamentals of knowledge, dipping into science, politics and other arcana, forever seeking an education that is both profound and practical; on the other, I must keep spiritually alive and brilliantly alive, for poetry is, as the moral Milton conceded in practice and precept, a sensuous, passionate, brutal thing. I put in the last adjective because I am modern and angry and puritanical ... The relevance of such schedule to poetry is obvious. I cannot think it a pedantry that a man desiring to speak (or sing) something important should also desire to speak with certainty. Also if he lack scope, such as an acquaintance with science and an acquaintance with other languages, he will be romantic and an anachronism.”

— Robert Lowell

“We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.”

— Robert Lowell

“You trip and lance
Your finger at a crab. It strikes. You rub
It inch-meal to a bilge of shell. You dance
Child-crazy over tub and gunnel, grasping
Your pitchfork like a trident, poised to stab
The greasy eel-grass clasping and unclasping
The jellied iridescence of the crab.”

— Robert Lowell

“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”

— Robert Lowell

“It is night,
And it is vanity, and age
Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear,
The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.”

— Robert Lowell

“Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.”

— Robert Lowell

“Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.”

— Robert Lowell

Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.

— Robert Lowell

“I'm sure that writing isn't a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration. That can't be taught, it can't be what you use in teaching.”

— Robert Lowell

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

— Robert Lowell

“Life begins to happen.
My hoppped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes”

— Robert Lowell

“Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.”

— Robert Lowell

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.

— Robert Lowell

September twenty-second, Sir, the bough cracks with unpicked apples, and at dawn the small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn.

— Robert Lowell

“But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot”

— Robert Lowell

It's the light of the oncoming train.

— Robert Lowell

The scythers, Time and Death,
Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath

— Robert Lowell

“Talking about the past is like a cat's trying to explain climbing down a ladder,”

— Robert Lowell

“I myself am hell;
nobody's here”

— Robert Lowell

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye

— Robert Lowell

“It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.”

— Robert Lowell