Robert Lowell

thumb|These are the tranquilized Fifties,and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,and made my manic statement,telling off the state and president, and thensat waiting sentence in the bull penbeside a Negro boy with curlicuesof marijuana in his hair. Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet. Among his relatives were James Russell Lowell, Percival Lowell and Amy Lowell. Quotes It's terrible, Bob, to think that all I've suffered, and all the suffering I've caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain. Quoted in Robert Giroux's introduction to Lowell's Collected Prose (1987), pp. xiii–xiv The poets who most directly influenced me ... were Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. An unlikely combination! ... but you can see that Bishop is a sort of bridge between Tate's formalism and Williams's informal art. Interview by Stanley Kunitz, "Talk with Robert Lowell", The New York Times (Oct. 4, 1964), p. BR34 Lord Weary's Castle (1946) New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Christ walks on the black water. In Black MudDarts the kingfisher. On Corpus Christi, heart,Over the drum-beat of St. Stephen’s choirI hear him, Stupor Mundi, and the mudFlies from his hunching wings and beak—my heart,The blue kingfisher dives on you in fire. "Colloquy in Black Rock", st. 5 A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket—The sea was still breaking violently and nightHad steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. LightFlashed from his matted head and marble feet,He grappled at the netWith the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,Its open, staring eyesWere lustreless dead-lightsOr cabin-windows on a stranded hulkHeavy with sand. "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket", sec. 1 The Lord survives the rainbow of His will. "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket", sec. 7 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 obsceneCatches kept his conscience clean. "The Drunken Fisherman", st. 3 I will catch Christ with a greased worm. "The Drunken Fisherman", st. 5 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. "Mr. Edwards and the Spider", st. 1 This is the Black Widow, death. "Mr. Edwards and the Spider", st. 5 I saw the sky descending, black and white,Not blue, on Boston. "Where the Rainbow Ends", st. 1 Life Studies (1959) The lights of science couldn't hold a candleto Mary risen—at one miraculous stroke,angel-wing'd, gorgeous as a jungle bird! "Beyond the Alps" Now Paris, our black classic, breaking uplike killer kings on an Etruscan cup. "Beyond the Alps" You said:"We poets in our youth begin in sadness;thereof in the end come despondency and madness." "To Delmore Schwartz (Cambridge 1946)" Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,must lay his heart out for my bed and board. "Words for Hart Crane" I doodle handlebarmoustaches on the last Russian Czar "Grandparents" Terrible that old life of decencywithout unseemly intimacyor quarrels, when the unemancipated womanstill had her Freudian papá and maids! "During Fever" We are old-timers,each of us holds a locked razor. "Waking in the Blue" I keep no rank nor station.Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small. "Home After Three Months Away" Only teaching on Tuesdays, bookwormingin pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,I hog a whole house on Boston's"hardly passionate Marlborough Street." "Memories of West Street and Lepke", st. 1 These are the tranquilized Fifties,and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,and made my manic statement,telling off the state and president, and thensat waiting sentence in the bull penbeside a Negro boy with curlicuesof marijuana in his hair. "Memories of West Street and Lepke", st. 2 Flabby, bald, lobotomized,he drifted in a sheepish calm,where no agonizing reappraisaljarred his concentration on the electric chair—hanging like an oasis in his airof lost connections. "Memories of West Street and Lepke", st. 4 Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed. "Man and Wife"    Oh my Petite,clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve. "Man and Wife" Your old-fashioned tirade—loving, rapid, merciless—breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head. "Man and Wife" Gored by the climacteric of his want,he stalls above me like an elephant. "To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage" My mind’s not right.A car radio bleats,"Love, O careless Love...." I hearmy ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,as if my hand were at its throat....I myself am hell;nobody's here. "Skunk Hour", sts. 5, 6 For the Union Dead (1964) At forty-five,What next, what next?I meet my father,my age, still alive. "Middle Age", st. 2 Father, forgive memy injuries,as I forgivethose Ihave injured!You never climbedMount Sion, yet leftdinosaurdeath-steps on the crust,where I must walk. "Middle Age", st. 4 We are like a lot of wildspiders crying together,but without tears. "Fall 1961" I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil "Eye and Tooth", st. 9 But I suppose even God was borntoo late to trust the old religion—all those settings outthat never left the ground,beginning in wisdom, dying in doubt. "Tenth Muse" thumb|Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat. 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 fishbonein the city's throat.Its Colonel is as leanas a compass-needle.He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gentle tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy. "For the Union Dead", sts. 7–9 On Boylston Street, a commercial photographshows Hiroshima boiling. "For the Union Dead", st. 14 When I crouch to my television set,the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. "For the Union Dead", st. 15 The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,giant finned cars nose forward like fish;a savage servilityslides by on grease. "For the Union Dead", st. 17 Near the Ocean (1967) London: Faber and Faber O to break loose, like the chinooksalmon jumping and falling back,nosing up to the impossiblestone and bone-crushing waterfall. "Waking Early Sunday Morning", st. 1 Pity the planet, all joy gonefrom this sweet volcanic cone;peace to our children when they fallin small war on the heels of smallwar—until the end of timeto police the earth, a ghostorbiting forever lostin our monotonous sublime. "Waking Early Sunday Morning", st. 14 Notebook 1967–68 (1969) New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux After loving you so much, can I forgetyou for eternity, and have no other choice? "Obit" Notebook (1970) London: Faber & Faber Rome, if built at all, must be built in a day "Le Vieux Caton" History (1973) New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux No one like one's mother and father ever lived. "Returning" The Dolphin (1973) New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux The line must terminate.Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve gladdened a lifetimeknotting, 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. "Fishnet My eyes have seen what my hand did. "Dolphin" Day by Day (1977) New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux If we see light at the end of the tunnel,It's the light of the oncoming train. "Since 1939" If I could go through it all again,the slender iron rungs of growing up,I would be as young as any,a child lostin unreality and loud music. "Realities" It has taken me the time since you diedto discover you are as human as I am...if I am. "To Mother" I—really I can do little,as little now as then,about the infernal fires—I cannot blow out a match. "Grass Fires" We are poor passing facts,warned by that to giveeach figure in the photographhis living name. "Epilogue" Quotes about Robert Lowell He was formal in a rather awkward New England sense. His voice was soft and slow as he read the students' poems. At first I felt the impatient desire to interrupt his slow, line-by-line readings. He would read the first line, stop, and then discuss it at length. I wanted to go through the whole poem quickly and then go back. I couldn't see any merit in dragging through it until you almost hated the damned thing, even your own poems, especially your own. At that point, I wrote to Snodgrass about my impatience, and his reply went this way, "Frankly, I used to nod my head at his every statement, and he taught me more than a whole gang of scholars could." So I kept my mouth shut, and Snodgrass was right. Robert Lowell's method of teaching is intuitive and open. After he had read a student's poem, he would read another evoked by it. Comparison was often painful. He worked with a cold chisel, with no more mercy than a dentist. He got out the decay, but if he was never kind to the poem, he was kind to the poet. Anne Sexton, interview with The Paris Review (1971) I loved his openness to receive influences. He was not a poet who said, "I'm an American poet, I'm going to be peculiar, and I'm going to have my own voice which is going to be different from anybody's voice." He was a poet who said, "I'm going to take in everything." He had a kind of multifaceted imagination; he was not embarrassed to admit that he was influenced even in his middle-age by William Carlos Williams, or by François Villon, or by Boris Pasternak, all at the same time. That was wonderful. Derek Walcott, interview with The Paris Review'' (1985) External links Category:1917 births Category:1977 deaths Category:Poets from Boston Category:Formalist poets Category:Activists from the United States Category:Anti-war activists Category:Prisoners Category:Catholics from the United States