Robert Lowell Quotes

• 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.

  Robert Lowell

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

  Robert Lowell

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• We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering; If we see the light at the end of the tunnel, It’s the light of the oncoming train.

  Robert Lowell

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• Age is our reconciliation with dullness.

  Robert Lowell

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• My Darling, prickly hedgehog of the heart, chocolates, cherries, hairshirts, pinks and glass— when we joined in the sublime blindness of courtship loving lost all its vice with half its virtue.

  Robert Lowell

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• Life is too short to silver over this tarnish. The gods, employed to haunt and punish husbands, have no hand for trigger-fine distinctions, their myopia makes all error mortal.

  Robert Lowell

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• Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone.

  Robert Lowell

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• O that the spirit could remain tinged but untarnished by its strain!

  Robert Lowell

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• Yours the lawlessness of something simple that has lost its law.

  Robert Lowell

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• The elect, the elected…they come here bright as dimes, and die dishevelled and soft.

  Robert Lowell

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• But I suppose even God was born too late to trust the old religion— all those settings out that never left the ground, beginning in wisdom, dying in doubt.

  Robert Lowell

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• The man is killing time—there’s nothing else.

  Robert Lowell

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• 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.

  Robert Lowell

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• Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

  Robert Lowell

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• William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat.

  Robert Lowell

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• I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile.

  Robert Lowell

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• I keep no rank nor station. Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

  Robert Lowell

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• This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools To send the Pequod packing off to hell.

  Robert Lowell

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• They died When time was open-eyed, Wooden and childish; only bones abide There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news of IS, the whited monster.

  Robert Lowell

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• 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.

  Robert Lowell

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Robert Lowell (26)

Birth:	1st March, 1917
Death:	12th September, 1977
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Poet

About

Robert "Cal" Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered to be one of the founders of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948.

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