Day by Day Quotes

“Yet why not say what happened?”
― Robert Lowell, Day by Day

“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”
― Robert Lowell, Day by Day

“Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
― Robert Lowell, Day by Day