New Selected Poems Quotes

“Epilogue

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.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“After loving you so much, can I forget you for eternity, and have no other choice?”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“A genius temperament should be handled with care.”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“The twinkling steel above me is a star; I am a fallen Christmas tree. Our car Races through seven red-lights—then the road Is unpatrolled and empty, and a load Of ply-wood with a tail-light makes us slow. I turn and whisper in her ear. You know I want to leave my mother and my wife, You wouldn’t have me tied to them for life … Time runs, the windshield runs with stars.”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“I grow too merry, when I stand in my nakedness to dress.”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“You lie in my insomniac arms, as if you drank sleep like coffee.”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“They fly by like a train window:”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“houses wall the path”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“By miracle, I left the party half an hour behind you, reached home five hours drunker,”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“The thick lemony honeysuckle, climbing from the earthroot to your window, will open more beautiful blossoms to the evening;”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“After my marriage, I found myself in constant companionship with this almost stranger I found neither agreeable, interesting, nor admirable,”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“he is eloquently angry,”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“Who can help us from our nothing to the all, we aging downstream faster than a scepter can check?”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“only by suffering the rat-race in the arena can the heart learn to beat.”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems

“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.”
― Robert Lowell, New Selected Poems