Quotes from Robert Lowell

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

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

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

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

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.

In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.

If I could go through it all again,the slender iron rungs of growing up,I would be as young as any,a child lostin unreality and loud music.

O to break loose, like the chinooksalmon jumping and falling back,nosing up to the impossiblestone and bone-crushing waterfall.

No one like one's mother and father ever lived.

Gored by the climacteric of his want,he stalls above me like an elephant.

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,he drifted in a sheepish calm,where no agonizing reappraisaljarred his concentration on the electric chair—hanging like an oasis in his airof lost connections.

The line must terminate.Yet my heart rises, I know I've gladdened a lifetimeknotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

Pity the planet, all joy gonefrom this sweet volcanic cone;peace to our children when they fallin small war on the heels of smallwar.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,giant finned cars nose forward like fish;a savage servilityslides by on grease.

your old-fashioned tirade—loving, rapid, merciless—breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

We beg delinquents for our life.

I doodle handlebarmoustaches on the last Russian Czar.

Oh my Petite,clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve.

I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.

My mind's not right.A car radio bleats,"Love, O careless Love…. " I hearmy ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,as if my hand were at its throat….I myself am hell;nobody's here.

These are the tranquillized Fifties,and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,and made my manic statement,telling off the state and president, and thensat waiting sentence in the bull penbeside a Negro boy with curlicuesof marijuana in his hair.

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

Rome, if built at all, must be built in a day.

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed.