Amy Lowell Quotes

#1. Everything mortal has moments immortal

Amy Lowell

#2. 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

#3. In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Amy Lowell

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.

Amy Lowell

#8. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose.

Amy Lowell

#9. On the neck of the young man sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise. Youth condemns; maturity condones.

Amy Lowell

#10. 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

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

Amy Lowell

#12. 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

#13. You are ice and fire
The touch of you burns my hands like snow

Amy Lowell

#14. Rapture's self is three parts sorrow.

Amy Lowell

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

Amy Lowell

#18. Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.

Amy Lowell

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

Amy Lowell

#20. To-night when the full-bellied moon swallows the stars. Grant that I know.

Amy Lowell

#21. 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

#22. Sexual love is the most stupendous fact of the universe, and the most magical mystery our poor blind senses know.

Amy Lowell

#23. 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

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

Amy Lowell

#25. Happiness, to some, is elation; to others it is mere stagnation.

Amy Lowell

#26. 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

#27. How loud clocks can tick when a room is empty, and one is alone!

Amy Lowell

#28. 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

#29. Christ! What are patterns for?

Amy Lowell

#30. 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

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

Amy Lowell

#32. Love is a game-yes? I think it is a drowning.

Amy Lowell

#33. In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jeweled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern.

Amy Lowell

#34. 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

#35. Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.

Amy Lowell

#36. 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

#37. Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.

Amy Lowell

#38. I shall go
Up and down
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.

Amy Lowell

#39. I know that a creed is the shell of a lie.

Amy Lowell

#40. Even Pain pricks to livelier living.

Amy Lowell

#41. Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.

Amy Lowell

#42. Without poetry the soul and heart of man starves and dies.

Amy Lowell

#43. 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

#44. All recurring joy is pain refined.

Amy Lowell

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

Amy Lowell

#46. 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

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

Amy Lowell

#48. Oh! To be a flower Nodding in the sun, Bending, then upspringing As the breezes run.

Amy Lowell

#49. When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.

Amy Lowell

#50. 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

#51. Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

Amy Lowell

#52. Witches are moon-birds,
Witches are the women of the false, beautiful moon.

Amy Lowell

#53. 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

#54. Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone and brocade.

Amy Lowell

#55. Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls.

Amy Lowell

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give.

Amy Lowell

#59. How hard, how desperately hard, is the way of the experimenter in art!

Amy Lowell

#60. 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

#61. 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

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

Amy Lowell

#63. A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men.

Amy Lowell

#64. May is much sunshine through small leaves.

Amy Lowell

#65. 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

#66. Brighter than fireflies upon the Uji River are your words in the dark, Beloved.

Amy Lowell