Amy Lowell Quotes & Sayings

I must be mad, or very tired, When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon. — Amy Lowell

My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings Vibrate most readily to minor chords, Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words Which voice the passion and the ache of things: Illusions beating with their baffled wings Against the walls of circumstance. — Amy Lowell

Love is a game-yes? I think it is a drowning. — Amy Lowell

In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jeweled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. — Amy Lowell

Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness. — Amy Lowell

If what we worship fail us, still the fire burns on, and it is much to have believed. — Amy Lowell

I shall go
Up and down
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed. — Amy Lowell

Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation. — Amy Lowell

Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line. — Amy Lowell

I ask but one thing of you, only one, That always you will be my dream of you; That never shall I wake to find untrue All this I have believed and rested on, Forever vanished, like a vision gone Out into the night. Alas, how few There are who strike in us a chord we knew Existed, but so seldom heard its tone We tremble at the half-forgotten sound. The world is full of rude awakenings And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground, Yet still our human longing vainly clings To a belief in beauty through all wrongs. O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs! — Amy Lowell

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum. — Amy Lowell

Great emotion always tends to become rhythmic, and out of that tendency the forms of art have been evolved. Art becomes artificial only when the forms take precedence over the emotion. — Amy Lowell

Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come. — Amy Lowell

When you came, you were like red wine and honey, and the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness. — Amy Lowell

On the neck of the young man sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise. Youth condemns; maturity condones. — Amy Lowell

Everything mortal has moments immortal — Amy Lowell

Oh! To be a flower Nodding in the sun, Bending, then upspringing As the breezes run. — Amy Lowell

Witches are moon-birds,
Witches are the women of the false, beautiful moon. — Amy Lowell

Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses All bent upon killing, because their "of courses" Are not quite the same. — Amy Lowell

Oh! To be a butterfly Still, upon a flower, Winking with its painted wings, Happy in the hour. — Amy Lowell

Venus Transiens

Tell me,
Was Venus more beautiful
Than you are,
When she topped
The crinkled waves,
Drifting shoreward
On her plaited shell?
Was Botticelli's vision
Fairer than mine;
And were the painted rosebuds
He tossed his lady
Of better worth
Than the words I blow about you
To cover your too great loveliness
As with a gauze
Of misted silver?

For me,
You stand poised
In the blue and buoyant air,
Cinctured by bright winds,
Treading the sunlight.
And the waves which precede you
Ripple and stir
The sands at my feet. — Amy Lowell

When trying to explain anything, I usually find that the Bible, that great collection of magnificent and varied poetry, has said it before in the best possible way. — Amy Lowell

Brighter than fireflies upon the Uji River are your words in the dark, Beloved. — Amy Lowell

This is war: Boys flung into a breach Like shoveled earth; And old men, Broken, Driving rapidly before crowds of people In a glitter of silly decorations. Behind the boys And the old men, Life weeps, And shreds her garments To the blowing winds. — Amy Lowell

How hard, how desperately hard, is the way of the experimenter in art! — Amy Lowell

Christ! What are patterns for? — Amy Lowell

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. — Amy Lowell

Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils. — Amy Lowell

Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls. — Amy Lowell

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly. — Amy Lowell

The Taxi
When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night? — Amy Lowell

The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.
See how the roof glitters, like ice!
Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night. — Amy Lowell

Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become. — Amy Lowell

I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done. — Amy Lowell

Happiness, to some, is elation; to others it is mere stagnation. — Amy Lowell

You are ice and fire
The touch of you burns my hands like snow — Amy Lowell

Vernal Equinox
The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies
between me and my book;
And the South Wind, washing through the room,
Makes the candles quiver.
My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy with the thrusting of green shoots
Outside, in the night.
Why are you not here to overpower me with your
tense and urgent love? — Amy Lowell

Even Pain pricks to livelier living. — Amy Lowell

Guarded within the old red wall's embrace, Marshalled like soldiers in gay company, The tulips stand arrayed. Here infantry Wheels out into the sunlight. — Amy Lowell

Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.
Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays. — Amy Lowell

I should like to bring a case to trial: Prosperity versus Beauty, Cash registers teetering in a balance against the comfort of the soul. — Amy Lowell

Sexual love is the most stupendous fact of the universe, and the most magical mystery our poor blind senses know. — Amy Lowell

All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words. — Amy Lowell

Without poetry the soul and heart of man starves and dies. — Amy Lowell

Apples of Hesperides

Glinting golden through the trees,
Apples of Hesperides!
Through the moon-pierced warp of night
Shoot pale shafts of yellow light,
Swaying to the kissing breeze
Swings the treasure, golden-gleaming,
Apples of Hesperides!.

Far and lofty yet they glimmer,
Apples of Hesperides!
Blinded by their radiant shimmer,
Pushing forward just for these;
Dew-besprinkled, bramble-marred,
Poor duped mortal, travel-scarred,
Always thinking soon to seize
And possess the golden-glistening
Apples of Hesperides!.

Orbed, and glittering, and pendent,
Apples of Hesperides!
Not one missing, still transcendent,
Clustering like a swarm of bees.
Yielding to no man's desire,
Glowing with a saffron fire,
Splendid, unassailed, the golden
Apples of Hesperides! — Amy Lowell

All recurring joy is pain refined. — Amy Lowell

Don't ask a writer what he's working on. It's like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease. — Amy Lowell

Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity. — Amy Lowell

Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her. — Amy Lowell

A black cat among roses,
phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon,
the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still.
It is dazed with moonlight,
contented with perfume ... — Amy Lowell

How loud clocks can tick when a room is empty, and one is alone! — Amy Lowell

Lilacs, False Blue, White, Purple,
Colour of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England ...
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversation with an early moon;
Lilacs watching a deserted house; ...
Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom,
You are everywhere. — Amy Lowell

This is America, This vast, confused beauty, This staring, restless speed of loveliness, Mighty, overwhelming, crude, of all forms, Making grandeur out of profusion, Afraid of no incongruities, Sublime in its audacity, Bizarre breaker of moulds. — Amy Lowell

To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader. — Amy Lowell

How much more beautiful is the moon, Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree; The moon Wavering across a bed of tulips; The moon, Still, Upon your face. You shine, Beloved, You and the moon. But which is the reflection? — Amy Lowell

You lie upon my heart as on a nest,
Folded in peace, for you can never know
How crushed I am with having you at rest
Heavy upon my life. I love you so
You bind my freedom from its rightful quest.
In mercy lift your drooping wings and go. — Amy Lowell

To-night when the full-bellied moon swallows the stars. Grant that I know. — Amy Lowell

So with the stretch of the white road before me,
Shining snow crystals rainbowed by the sun,
Fields that are white, stained with long, cool, blue shadows,
Strong with the strength of my horse as we run.
Joy in the touch of the wind and the sunlight!
Joy! With the vigorous earth I am one. — Amy Lowell

The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius. — Amy Lowell

Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give. — Amy Lowell

Decade
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished. — Amy Lowell

Happiness: We rarely feel it. I would buy it, beg it, steal it, Pay in coins of dripping blood For this one transcendent good. — Amy Lowell

Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone and brocade. — Amy Lowell

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented ... — Amy Lowell

I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem. — Amy Lowell

A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men. — Amy Lowell

Can you see through the night, woman, that you stare so upon it? Man, what sparks do your eyes follow in the smouldering darkness? — Amy Lowell

Rapture's self is three parts sorrow. — Amy Lowell

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern. — Amy Lowell

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it. — Amy Lowell

Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance. — Amy Lowell

Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose. — Amy Lowell

My words are little jars For you to take and put upon a shelf. Their shapes are quaint and beautiful, And they have many pleasant colours and lustres To recommend them. Also the scent from them fills the room With sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses. — Amy Lowell

I know that a creed is the shell of a lie. — Amy Lowell

Now you are come! You tremble like a star Poised where, behind earth's rim, the sun has set. Your voice has sung across my heart, but numb And mute, I have no tones to answer. — Amy Lowell

May is much sunshine through small leaves. — Amy Lowell