“Some of us aren't meant to belong. Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.”
―
Elizabeth Lowell,
Remember Summer
“I'm not perfect. Remember that, and try to forgive me when I fail you.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Sweet Wind, Wild Wind
“If you're not going to get any wiser, what's the point of getting older?” ― Elizabeth Lowell
“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.” ― Robert Lowell, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
“More than anything, I began to hate women writers. Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. Bronte, Bronte, and Bronte. I began to resent Emily, Anne, and Charlotte—my old friends—with a terrifying passion. They were not only talented; they were brave, a trait I admired more than anything but couldn't seem to possess. The world that raised these women hadn't allowed them to write, yet they had spun fiery novels in spite of all the odds. Meanwhile, I was failing with all the odds tipped in my favor. Here I was, living out Virginia Woolf's wildest feminist fantasy. I was in a room of my own. The world was no longer saying, "Write? What's the good of your writing?" but was instead saying "Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me.” ― Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs
“One shouldn't get too involved with people who can't possibly understand one” ― Elizabeth Bishop, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
“t's okay to let yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back. -” ― Elizabeth Lowell
“How long can a man live on the outside before he loses his ability to love? How long before there's no more hope?” ― Elizabeth Lowell, A Woman Without Lies
“Show me your dreams. Let me make them come true.” ― Elizabeth Lowell
“Love is the light that casts no shadow.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Only You
“Sometimes the best part in life is an accident that goes right.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Beautiful Dreamer
“Yes," Shannon said calmly. "I could have died. But so what? The stars would have come out tonight and the sun would have risen tomorrow morning. The only difference would be that I wouldn't see it." Shannon to Whip.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Only Love
“A reflection on Robert LowellRobert 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.” ― Robert Pinsky
“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?” ― Elizabeth Bishop, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
“The sacred rowan is a woman born long, long ago, a woman whose refusal to see love cost first her lover's life, then the lives of her family, her clan, her people.But not her own life. Not quite.In pity and punishment she was turned into an undying tree, a rowan that weeps only in the presence of transcendent love; and the tears of the rowan are blossoms that confer extraordinary grace upon those who can see them.When enough tears are wept, the rowan will be free. She waits inside a sacred ring that can be neither weighed or measured nor touched. She waits for love that is worth her tears.The rowan is waiting still.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Enchanted
“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.” ― Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures
“You saw too late. Now you are as she is, bewteen two worlds, warmth bleeding into cold.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Enchanted
“You may hold my tears and live as you did before, trusting your soul to no one. Or you may release my tears and accept what comes.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Enchanted
“What is dollar value but something to amuse people who have no imagination? People who have money and no imagination follow fashion. People who have imagination and no money fashion styles.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, The Secret Sister
“I'm not perfect. Remember that, and try to forgive me when I fail you.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Sweet Wind, Wild Wind
“If you're not going to get any wiser, what's the point of getting older?” ― Elizabeth Lowell
“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.” ― Robert Lowell, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
“More than anything, I began to hate women writers. Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. Bronte, Bronte, and Bronte. I began to resent Emily, Anne, and Charlotte—my old friends—with a terrifying passion. They were not only talented; they were brave, a trait I admired more than anything but couldn't seem to possess. The world that raised these women hadn't allowed them to write, yet they had spun fiery novels in spite of all the odds. Meanwhile, I was failing with all the odds tipped in my favor. Here I was, living out Virginia Woolf's wildest feminist fantasy. I was in a room of my own. The world was no longer saying, "Write? What's the good of your writing?" but was instead saying "Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me.” ― Catherine Lowell, The Madwoman Upstairs
“One shouldn't get too involved with people who can't possibly understand one” ― Elizabeth Bishop, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
“t's okay to let yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back. -” ― Elizabeth Lowell
“How long can a man live on the outside before he loses his ability to love? How long before there's no more hope?” ― Elizabeth Lowell, A Woman Without Lies
“Show me your dreams. Let me make them come true.” ― Elizabeth Lowell
“Love is the light that casts no shadow.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Only You
“Sometimes the best part in life is an accident that goes right.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Beautiful Dreamer
“Yes," Shannon said calmly. "I could have died. But so what? The stars would have come out tonight and the sun would have risen tomorrow morning. The only difference would be that I wouldn't see it." Shannon to Whip.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Only Love
“A reflection on Robert LowellRobert 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.” ― Robert Pinsky
“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?” ― Elizabeth Bishop, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
“The sacred rowan is a woman born long, long ago, a woman whose refusal to see love cost first her lover's life, then the lives of her family, her clan, her people.But not her own life. Not quite.In pity and punishment she was turned into an undying tree, a rowan that weeps only in the presence of transcendent love; and the tears of the rowan are blossoms that confer extraordinary grace upon those who can see them.When enough tears are wept, the rowan will be free. She waits inside a sacred ring that can be neither weighed or measured nor touched. She waits for love that is worth her tears.The rowan is waiting still.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Enchanted
“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.” ― Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures
“You saw too late. Now you are as she is, bewteen two worlds, warmth bleeding into cold.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Enchanted
“You may hold my tears and live as you did before, trusting your soul to no one. Or you may release my tears and accept what comes.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, Enchanted
“What is dollar value but something to amuse people who have no imagination? People who have money and no imagination follow fashion. People who have imagination and no money fashion styles.” ― Elizabeth Lowell, The Secret Sister
