Quotes from Robert Lowell

he is eloquently angry

After my marriage, I found myself in constant companionship with this almost stranger I found neither agreeable, interesting, nor admirable

The wild ingrafted olive and the root Are withered, and a winter drifts to where The Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spans Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles. I saw my city in the Scales, the pans Of judgment rising and descending. Piles Of dead leaves char the air— And I am a red arrow on this graph Of Revelations.

A genius temperament should be handled with care.

The thick lemony honeysuckle, climbing from the earthroot to your window, will open more beautiful blossoms to the evening;

I find that I fall into two parts which roughly correspond to instinct and conscience. To use a figure, I might characterize both parts as writers. Neither one, as far as the simple daily calls of life go, is much of a success.

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

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. from "Epilogue

houses wall the path

My trouble seems [. . .] to be to bring together in me the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and the gushes of pure wildness. One can't survive or write without both but they need to come to terms.

Help, saw me in two, put me on the shelf!

I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

Brother, try, O Child of Aphrodite, try to die: To die is life.

Our cost Is nothing to the lovers, whoring Mars And Venus, father's lover.

distant hills powdered blue as a girl's eyelid

Then the dry road dust rises to whiten the fatigued elm leaves- the nineteenth century, tired of children, is gone. They're all gone into a world of light; the farm's my own.

All autumn, the chafe and jar of nuclear war; we have talked our extinction to death. I swim like a minnow behind my studio window.

For a week my heart has pointed elsewhere: it brings us here tonight, and ties our hands– if we leaned forward, and should dip a finger into this river's momentary black flow, infinite small stars would break like fish. from "The Charles River

The immortal is scraped Unconsenting from the mortal.

The barberry berry sticks on the small hedge, cold slits the same crease in the finger, the same thorn hurts. The leaf repeats the lesson.

This is the departure strip, the dream-road. Whoever built it left numbers, words and arrows. He had to leave in a hurry.

After loving you so much, can I forget you for eternity, and have no other choice?

only by suffering the rat-race in the arena can the heart learn to beat.

Animals fattened for your for your arena suffered less than you in dying-yours the lawlessness of something simple that has lost its law, my namesake, and the last Caligula.