44
" 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. "
― Robert Lowell
46
" 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. "
― Robert Lowell
48
" ....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. "
― Robert Lowell
51
" 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. "
― Robert Lowell
57
" 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. "
― Robert Lowell
58
" 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. "
― Robert Lowell