Robert Lowell Quotes

The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.

In the end, there is no end.

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

In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.

Some morbidity in me attracts mosquitoes

One shouldn't get too involved with people who can't possibly understand one

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

Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heel of small war--until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime

The dead season when wolves live off the wind.

how fine our distinctions when we cannot choose

What we love we are.

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

We are poor passing facts. warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, "with one skin-layer missing.

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.

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;

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.

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

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

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.

Since we do float on an unknown sea, I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what may depend on it?

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.

Mania has been described as having a mystical quality, an example of which is described by the writer Theodore Roethke. One day he felt good, and then felt that he knew what it was like to be a rabbit, and then a lion; so he entered a restaurant and ordered and ate raw meat. Kay Redfield Jameson bought twenty Penguin books in order to form a colony of penguins, and the poet Robert Lowell believed on one occasion that he might be the reincarnation of the Holy Ghost and could, if he wished, paralyze cars.

MCLEAN HOSPITAL IS known for its former residents who, with their distinguished madness, gave it a noted reputation. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.

The promising young poets, the hopefuls? I'd name Richard Wilbur, Peter Viereck, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ciardi...Leonard Bacon...but it is still too early to assertions. They're all 'in the field.' It remains to be seen how many will cross the finish line.

No weekends for the gods now. Wars flicker, earth licks its open sores, fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance assassinations, no advance. Only man thinning out his own kind sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind swipe of the pruner and his knife busy about the tree of life... Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war - until the end of time to police th eearth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime.

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

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

The black hardrubber bathtub stopper at the Parker house.

The slick bare tar, the same suburban station.

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.

The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.

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.

You never know that. I don't know it; Robert Lowell doesn't know it; John Berryman didn't know it; and Shakespeare probably didn't know it. There's never any final certainty about what you do. Your opinion of your own work fluctuates wildly. Under the right circumstances you can pick up something that you've written and approve of it; you'll think it's good and that nobody could have done exactly the same thing. Under different circumstances, you'll look at exactly the same poem and say, “My Lord, isn't that boring.” The most important thing is to be excited about what you are doing and to be working on something that you think will be the greatest thing that ever was. One of the difficulties in writing poetry is to maintain your sense of excitement and discovery about what you write.

Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise, your wandering silences and bright trouvailles, dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish... saying too little, then too much. Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them, the archetypal voices sing offkey; the old actor cannot read his friends, and nevertheless he reads himself aloud, genuis hums the auditorium dead. The line must terminate. Yet my heart rises, I know I've gladdened a lifetime knotting, 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.

Grief said C.S. Lewis is like "a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape." This is so. The lessons that come from grief come from its unexpected moves, from its shifting views of what had gone before and what is yet to come. Pain brought so often into one's consciousness cannot maintain the same capacity to wound. Grief, however creates strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anaesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell put it, "with one skin-layer missing." Grief conspires to ensure that it will in time wear itself out. Unlike depression, it acts to preserve the self. Depression is malignant, indiscriminately destructive. Grief may bear resemblance to depression, but it is a distant kinship. In Grief, death occasions the pain. In depression, death is the solution to the pain. In Grief, one feels the absence of a life, not life itself. In depression, it is otherwise one cannot access the beat of life!

Then morning comes, saying, "This was a night.

Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred his concentration on the electric chair- hanging like an oasis on his air of lost connections...

Spleen Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux, Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes, S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes. Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon, Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon. Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade; Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau, Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau, Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilette Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette. Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais pu De son être extirper l'élément corrompu, Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent, II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé // I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch, one who escapes his tutor's monologues, and kills the day in boredom with his dogs; nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry, his people dying by the balcony; the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite no longer gets him through a single night; his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb; even the ladies of the court, for whom all kings are beautiful, cannot put on shameful enough dresses for this skeleton; the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent washes to cleanse the poisoned element; even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy, our tyrants' solace in senility, he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood. — Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)

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

Madness is easy to overdramatize and thereby underestimate; it is less easy to convey its capacity to erode identity, disfigure love, and violate trust. The real horror of madness is more subtle and corrosive than its caricature.

No ease for the boy at the keyhole, his telescope, when the women's white bodies flashed in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail. Nothing! No oil for the eye, nothing to pour on those waters or flames. I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.

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.

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . . I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself-- to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did.

The Truth the Dead Know For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959 Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave. We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country people die. My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one's alone. Men kill for this, or for as much. And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone. Anne Sexton was a model who became a confessional poet, writing about intimate aspects of her life, after her doctor suggested that she take up poetry as a form of therapy. She studied under Robert Lowell at Boston University, where Sylvia Plath was one of her classmates. Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967, but later committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning. Topics she covered in her poems included adultery, masturbation, menstruation, abortion, despair and suicide.

Yet why not say what happened?

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

Surely the lives of the old are briefer than the young.

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

Salem" In salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips to the canvas flapping on the seaward panes until the knitting sailor stabs at ships nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft lashes the oily slick about your head, beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon's raft dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,-- There sewage sickens the rebellious seas. Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks. Where was it that New England bred the men who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks and fought the British Lion to his knees?

Oh to break loose like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall.... Time to grub up and junk the year's output, a dead wood of dry verse: dim confession, coy revelation, liftings, listless self-imitation, whole days when I could hardly speak, came pluming home unshaven, weak and willing to read anyone things done before and better done....

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.

The bones cry for the blood of the white whale, The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears, The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail, And hacks the coiling life out....

The way I always kind of look at it: everything’s important and nothing’s important. If you’re gonna have a drama, have it over something that’s worth the time. Some people take it more seriously than others, like a Lowell. But we all end up the same.

On The Death of Robert Lowell by Eileen Myles O, I don’t give a shit. He was an old white haired man Insensate beyond belief and Filled with much anxiety about his imagined Pain. Not that I’d know I hate fucking wasps. The guy was a loon. Signed up for Spring Semester at Macleans A really lush retreat among pines and Hippy attendants. Ray Charles also once rested there. So did James Taylor… The famous, as we know, are nuts. Take Robert Lowell. The old white haired coot. Fucking dead.

A reflection on Robert Lowell Robert Lowell knew I was not one of his devotees. I attended his famous “office hours” salon only a few times. Life Studies was not a book of central importance for me, though I respected it. I admired his writing, but not the way many of my Boston friends did. Among poets in his generation, poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Allen Ginsberg meant more to me than Lowell’s. I think he probably sensed some of that. To his credit, Lowell nevertheless was generous to me (as he was to many other young poets) just the same. In that generosity, and a kind of open, omnivorous curiosity, he was different from my dear teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters. Like Lowell, Winters attracted followers—but Lowell seemed almost dismayed or a little bewildered by imitators; Winters seemed to want disciples: “Wintersians,” they were called. A few years before I met Lowell, when I was still in California, I read his review of Winters’s Selected Poems. Lowell wrote that, for him, Winters’s poetry passed A. E. Housman’s test: he felt that if he recited it while he was shaving, he would cut himself. One thing Lowell and Winters shared, that I still revere in both of them, was a fiery devotion to the vocal essence of poetry: the work and interplay of sentences and lines, rhythm and pitch. The poetry in the sounds of the poetry, in a reader’s voice: neither page nor stage. Winters criticizing the violence of Lowell’s enjambments, or Lowell admiring a poem in pentameter for its “drill-sergeant quality”: they shared that way of thinking, not matters of opinion but the matter itself, passionately engaged in the art and its vocal—call it “technical”—materials. Lowell loved to talk about poetry and poems. His appetite for that kind of conversation seemed inexhaustible. It tended to be about historical poetry, mixed in with his contemporaries. When he asked you, what was Pope’s best work, it was as though he was talking about a living colleague . . . which in a way he was. He could be amusing about that same sort of thing. He described Julius Caesar’s entourage waiting in the street outside Cicero’s house while Caesar chatted up Cicero about writers. “They talked about poetry,” said Lowell in his peculiar drawl. “Caesar asked Cicero what he thought of Jim Dickey.” His considerable comic gift had to do with a humor of self and incongruity, rather than wit. More surreal than donnish. He had a memorable conversation with my daughter Caroline when she was six years old. A tall, bespectacled man with a fringe of long gray hair came into her living room, with a certain air. “You look like somebody famous,” she said to him, “but I can’t remember who.” “Do I?” “Yes . . . now I remember!— Benjamin Franklin.” “He was a terrible man, just awful.” “Or no, I don’t mean Benjamin Franklin. I mean you look like a Christmas ornament my friend Heather made out of Play-Doh, that looked like Benjamin Franklin.” That left Robert Lowell with nothing to do but repeat himself: “Well, he was a terrible man.” That silly conversation suggests the kind of social static or weirdness the man generated. It also happens to exemplify his peculiar largeness of mind . . . even, in a way, his engagement with the past. When he died, I realized that a large vacuum had appeared at the center of the world I knew.

... 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.

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...

I saw the sky descending, black and white, Not blue, on Boston where the winters wore The skulls to jack-o’-lanterns on the slates, And Hunger’s skin-and-bone retrievers tore The chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waits Its victim and tonight The worms will eat the deadwood to the foot Of Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death, Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath; 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 judgement rising and descending. Piles Of dead leaves char the air— And I am a red arrow on this graph Of Revelations. Every dove is sold. The Chapel’s sharp-shinned eagle shifts its hold On serpent-Time, the rainbow’s epitaph. In Boston serpents whistle at the cold. The victim climbs the altar steps and sings: “Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beast Who fans the furnace-face of IS with wings: I breathe the ether of my marriage feast.” At the high altar, gold And a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beat My cheek. What can the dove of Jesus give You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live, The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.

We find, therefore, Lowell and Mailer ostensibly locked in converse. In fact, out of the thousand separate enclaves of their very separate personalities, they sensed quickly that they now shared one enclave to the hilt: their secret detestation of liberal academic parties to accompany worthy causes. Yes, their snobbery was on this mountainous face close to identical—each had a delight in exactly the other kind of party, a posh evil social affair, they even supported a similar vein of vanity (Lowell with considerably more justice) that if they were doomed to be revolutionaries, rebels, dissenters, anarchists, protesters, and general champions of one Left cause or another, they were also, in private, grands conservateurs, and if the truth be told, poor damn émigré princes. They were willing if necessary (probably) to die for the cause—one could hope the cause might finally at the end have an unexpected hint of wit, a touch of the Lord’s last grace—but wit or no, grace or grace failing, it was bitter rue to have to root up one’s occupations of the day, the week, and the weekend and trot down to Washington for idiot mass manifestations which could only drench one in the most ineradicable kind of mucked-up publicity and have for compensation nothing at this party which might be representative of some of the Devil’s better creations. So Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer feigned deep conversation. They turned their heads to one another at the empty table, ignoring the potentially acolytic drinkers at either elbow, they projected their elbows out in fact like flying buttresses or old Republicans, they exuded waves of Interruption Repellent from the posture of their backs, and concentrated on their conversation, for indeed they were the only two men of remotely similar status in the room. (Explanations about the position of Paul Goodman will follow later.)

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

Buttercups" When we were children our papas were stout And colorless as seaweed or the floats At anchor off New Bedford. We were shut In gardens where our brassy sailor coats Made us like black-eyed susans bending out Into the ocean, Then my teeth were cut: A levelled broom-pole butt Was pushed into my thin And up-turned chin-- There were shod hoofs behind the horseplay. But I played Napoleon in my attic cell Until my shouldered broom Bobbed down the room With horse and neighing shell. Recall the shadows the doll-curtains veined On ancrem Winslow's ponderous plate from blue China, the breaking of time's haggard tide On the huge cobwebbed print of Waterloo, With a cracked smile across the glass. I cried To see the Emperor's sabered eagle slide From the clutching grenadier Staff-officer With the gold leaf cascading down his side-- A red dragoon, his plough-horse rearing, swayed Back on his reins to crop The buttercup Bursting upon the braid

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.

The Poet" His teeth splayed in a way he'd notice and pity in his closest enemies or friends. Youth held his eye; he blinked at passing beauties, birds of passage that could not close the gap. His wife was high-blooded, he counted on her living-- she lived, past sixty, then lived on in him, and often when he plotted lines, she breathed her acrid sweetness past his imaginings. She was still a magnificent handle of a woman-- did she have her lover as a novelist wished her? No--hating someone nearer, she found her voice-- no wife so loved; though Hardy, home from cycling, was glad to climb unnoticed to his study by a circling outside staircase, his own design.

Loser" "Father directed choir. When it paused on a Sunday, he liked to loiter out morning with the girls; then back to our cottage, dinner cold on the table, Mother locked in bed devouring tabloid. You should see him, white fringe about his ears, bald head more biased than a billiard ball-- he never left a party. Mother left by herself-- I threw myself from her car and broke my leg.... Years later, he said, 'How jolly of you to have jumped.' He forgot me, mother replaced his name, I miss him. When I am unhappy, I try to squeeze the hour an hour or half-hour smaller than it is; orphaned, I wake at midnight and pray for day-- the lovely ladies get me through the day

Oh Florence, Florence, patroness of the lovely tyrannicides! Where the tower of the Old Palace pierces the sky like a hypodermic needle, Perseus, David and Judith, lords and ladies of the Blood, Greek demi-gods of the Cross, rise sword in hand above the unshaven formless decapitation of the monsters, tubs of guts, mortifying chunks for the pack. Pity the monsters! Pity the monsters! Perhaps, one always took the wrong side - Ah, to have known, to have loved too many David and Judiths! My heart bleeds for the monster. I have seen the Gorgon. The erotic terror of her helpless, big-bosomed body lay like slop. Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone, her severed head swung like a lantern in the victor’s hand.

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.

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.

....One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, "Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody's here-- only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air-- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

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.

Summer Between Terms" The day's so calm and muggy I sweat tears, the summer's cloudcap and the summer's heat... surely good writers write all possible wrong-- are we so conscience-dark and cataract-blind, we only blame in others what they blame in us? (The sentence writes we, when charity wants I...) It takes such painful mellowing to use error... I have stood too long on a chair or ladder, branch-lightening forking through my thought and veins-- I cannot hang my heavy picture straight. I can't see myself...in the cattery, the tomcats doze till the litters are eatable, then find their kittens and chew off their breakable heads. They told us by harshness to win the stars. Planes, trains, lorries simmer through the garden, the reviewer sent by God to humble me ransacking my bags of dust for silver spoons-- he and I go on typing to go on living. There are ways to live on words in England-- reading for trainfare, my host ruined on wine, my ear gone bad from clinging to the ropes. I'd take a lower place, eat my toad hourly; even big frauds wince at fraudulence, and squirm from small incisions in the self-- they live on timetable with no time to tell. I'm sorry, I run with the hares now, not the hounds. I waste hours writing in and writing out a line, as if listening to conscience were telling the truth

We are the sum of all people we have ever met; you change the tribe and the tribe changes you." - Fierce People Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until… in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. - Aeschylus "A man like to me, Thou shalt love be loved by forever. A hand like this hand shall throw open the gates of new life to thee!" Robert Browning "Courage is grace under pressure." Ernest Hemingway "For each new morning with its light, For rest and shelter of the night, For health and food, for love and friends, For everything Thy goodness sends." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) “Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” ― Mahatma Gandhi “Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.” ― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching "Behind the dim unknown, standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." James Russel Lowell "My God, my Father, and my friend. Do not forsake me in the end." Wentworth Dillon

Children" Years back here we were children and at the stage of running in gangs about the meadows-- here to this one, there to that one. Where we picked up violets on lucky days, you can now see cattle gadding about. I still remember hunching ankle deep in violets, squabbling over which bunches were fairest. Our childishness was obvious-- we ran dancing rounds, we wore new green wreaths. So time passes. Here we ran swilling strawberries from oak to pine through hedges, through turnstiles-- as long as day was burning down. Once a gardener rushed from an arbor: "O.K. now, children, run home." We came out in spots those yesterdays, when we stuffed on strawberries; it was just a childish game to us. Often we heard the herdsman hooing and warning us: "Children, the woods are alive with snakes." And one of the children breaking through the sharp grass, grew white and shouted, "Children, a snake ran in there. He got our pony. She'll never get well. I wish that snake would go to hell!" "Well then, get out of the woods! If you don't hurry away quickly, I'll tell you what will happen-- if you don't leave the forest behind you by daylight, you'll lose yourselves; your pleasure will end in bawling." Do you know how five virgins dawdled in the meadow, till the king slammed his dining-room door? Their shouting and shame were outrageous: their jailor tore everything off them, down to their skins they stood like milk cows without any clothes.

That was the first growth, the heir of all my minutes, the victim of every ramification- more and more it grew green, and gave too much shelter. And now at my homecoming, the barked elms stand up like sticks along the street. I am a foot taller than when I left, and cannot see the dirt at my feet. Yet sometimes I catch my vague mind circling with a glazed eye for a name without a face, or a face without a name, and at every step, I startle them. They start up, dog-eared, bald as baby birds.

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.

The Drunken Fisherman" Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah's bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar to tell the day; A handkerchief to wave away The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm Pouching a bottle in one arm; A whiskey bottle full of worms; And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms To mete the worm whose molten rage Boils in the belly of old age? Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean. Children, the raging memory drools Over the glory of past pools. Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls Its bloody waters into holes; A grain of sand inside my shoe Mimics the moon that might undo Man and Creation too; remorse, Stinking, has puddled up its source; Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage. This is the pot-hole of old age. Is there no way to cast my hook Out of this dynamited brook? The Fisher's sons must cast about When shallow waters peter out. I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.

EB: 'Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he’d received from Dylan T[Thomas] before D’s last trip here [New York]—very clever, but it really can’t be published for a long, long time, he’s decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.—one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as 'A truck called F———.' RL: 'Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.' RL: 'I have just finished the Yeats Letters—900 & something pages—although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated.' RL: 'Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then.' EB: 'so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.

These qualities—independence, contrariness, ambition, toughness, receptiveness to experience—are the blood supply to a creative mind and temperament; they are wellspring to imagination. The ferocity and peculiarity that shadowed him when he was a boy later made their own contributions to the man and to his poetry. Lowell recognized that he could be remarkable. When he was eighteen he wrote in a school essay that “the accomplishments of man are unlimited…when he places all the strength of his mind and body to the task, a new almost divine power takes possession of him.” The enlightened mind is “always questioning itself, always seeking means of self-improvement, and always striving for something higher.” While still in school, his friend Frank Parker

Harvard’s political culture in the early 1920s was decidedly conservative. Soon after Robert’s arrival, the university imposed a quota to restrict the number of Jewish students. (By 1922, the Jewish student population had risen to twenty-one percent.) In 1924, the Harvard Crimson reported on its front page that the university’s former president Charles W. Eliot had publicly declared it “unfortunate” that growing numbers of the “Jewish race” were intermarrying with Christians. Few such marriages, he said, turned out well, and because biologists had determined that Jews are “prepotent” the children of such marriages “will look like Jews only.” While Harvard accepted a few Negroes, President A. Lawrence Lowell staunchly refused to allow them to reside in the freshman dormitories with whites.

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.

Fuzzy Britches was not an immediate success with Lowell. "Where's its legs?" he said darkly. "If it's a Martian, it ought to have three legs." "Well," argued Castor, "some Martians don't have legs." "Prove it!" "This one doesn't. That proves it." Meade picked Fuzzy Britches up; it immediately began to buzz—whereupon Lowell demanded to hold it. Meade passed it over. "I don't see," she remarked, "why anything as helpless as that would have such bright colors." "Think again, honey lamb," advised Hazel. "Put that thing out on the desert sand and you would lose it at ten feet. Which might be a good idea." "No!" answered Lowell. "'No' what, dear?" "Don't you lose Fuzzy Britches. He's mine." The child left carrying the flat cat and cooing a lullaby to it. Fuzzy Britches might lack legs but it knew how to win friends; anyone who picked it up hated to put it down. There was something intensely satisfying about petting the furry thing. Hazel tried to analyze it but could not.

Working fifty hours a week instead of forty would significantly reduce a worker’s leisure time in relative terms, but would also increase that worker’s income in relative terms. From any individual’s perspective, this would count as a net gain, since survey evidence reveals relative leisure to be less important than relative income.41 But others could of course follow suit, causing that advantage to prove ephemeral. Further support for this interpretation comes from survey evidence regarding the preferences of professional workers, who are not subject to the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The economists Renée Landers, James Rebitzer, and Lowell Taylor asked associates in large law firms which they would prefer: their current situation, or an otherwise similar one with an across-the-board cut of 10 percent in both hours and pay.42 By an overwhelming margin, respondents chose the latter. But they were not willing to choose that option unless their colleagues also did so.

The English departments were clogged with worthy but outworn and backwardlooking scholars whose tastes in the moderns were most often superficial, random, and vulgar. Students who. wanted to write got little practical help from their professors. They studied the classics as monsters that were slowly losing their fur and feathers and leaking a little sawdust. What one did oneself was all chance and shallowness, and no profession seemed wispier and less needed than that of the poet. My own group, that of Tate and Ransom, was all for the high discipline, for putting on the full armor of the past, for making poetry something that would take a man's full weight and that would bear his complete intelligence, passion, and subtlety. Almost anything, the Greek and Roman classics, Elizabethan dramatic poetry, seventeenth-century metaphysical verse, old and modern critics, aestheticians and philosophers, could be suppled up and again made necessary. The struggle perhaps centered on making the old metrical forms usable again to express the depths of one's experience.

But its other characteristic it shares with almost anything Martian. It can last long periods in hibernation, or if that isn't necessary, in a state of lowered vitality and activity—say when there is no food available. But with any increase in the food supply, then at once—almost like throwing a switch—it expands, multiplies to the full extent of the food supply." "I'll say it does!" "Cut off the food supply and it simply waits for more good times. Pure theory, of course, since I am reasoning by analogy from other Martian life forms—but that's why I'm going to have to disappoint Lowell. Fuzzy Britches will have to go on very short rations." Her husband frowned. "That won't be easy; he feeds it all the time. We'll just have to watch him—or there will be more little visitors from heaven. Honey, let's get busy. Right now." "Yes, dear. I just had to get my thoughts straight." Roger called them all to general quarters; Operation Roundup began. They shooed them aft and into the hold; they slithered back, purring and seeking companionship. Pollux got into the hold and tried to keep them herded together while the others scavenged through the ship. His father stuck his head in; tried to make out his son in a cloud of flat cats. "How many have you got so far?" "I can't count them—they keep moving around. Close the door!" "How can I keep the door closed and still send them in to you?" "How can I keep them in here if you keep opening the door?

Mr. Edwards and the Spider" 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; What are we in the hands of the great God? It was in vain you set up thorn and briar In battle array against the fire And treason crackling in your blood; For the wild thorns grow tame And will do nothing to oppose the flame; Your lacerations tell the losing game You play against a sickness past your cure. How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure? A very little thing, a little worm, Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said, Can kill a tiger. Will the dead Hold up his mirror and affirm To the four winds the smell And flash of his authority? It’s well If God who holds you to the pit of hell, Much as one holds a spider, will destroy, Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy On Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire: There’s no long struggle, no desire To get up on its feet and fly It stretches out its feet And dies. This is the sinner’s last retreat; Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat Then sinews the abolished will, when sick And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick. But who can plumb the sinking of that soul? Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast Into a brick-kiln where the blast Fans your quick vitals to a coal— If measured by a glass, How long would it seem burning! Let there pass A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze Is infinite, eternal: this is death, To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

There were the artifacts. The signed Lichtenstein that was presented as a wedding gift. The watercolor by Henry Miller for when I was born. Robert Lowell’s notes on her poems. Philip Roth and Saul Bellow were guests at the house and praised her work.

Why do we hunger so for vicious things? Our wishes bend the statues of the gods.

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.

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.

What can be salvaged from your life? A pain that gently darkens over heart and brain, a fairy's touch, a cobweb's weight of pain, now makes me tremble at your right to live.

Naval officers were not mother's sort; very few people were her sort in those days, and that was her trouble - a very authentic, human, and plausible difficulty, which made Mother's life one of much suffering. She did not have the self-assurance for wide human experience; she needed to feel liked, admired, surrounded by the approved and familiar. Her haughtiness and chilliness came from apprehension. She would start talking like a grande dame and then stand back rigid and faltering, as if she feared being crushed by her own massively intimidating offensive.

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

Past fifty, we learn with surprise and a sense of suicidal absolution that what we intended and failed could never have happened— and must be done better.

DELTA GEMINORUM and PLUTO. The new planet (arrow) is shown here shortly after discovery at Lowell Observatory, in February 1930. Date of Photograph is March 4, 1930.

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.

Things last, but sometimes for days here only children seem fit to handle children, and there is no utility or inspiration in the wind smashing without direction. The fresh paint on the captains' houses hides softer wood.

Writing of course is a kind of sickness. Well people don’t do it. Art is basically impossible. Edna O’Brien said she was surprised Van Gogh only cut off one ear. Robert Lowell said what he felt was a blazing out, flashes, nerve jabs in the moments the poem was coming.