Robert Lowell

Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet.

Robert Lowell

Among his relatives were James Russell Lowell, Percival Lowell and Amy Lowell.

Quotes

• A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket--
  The sea was still breaking violently and night
  Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
  When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
  Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
  He grappled at the net
  With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:
  The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
  Its open, staring eyes
  Were lustreless dead-lights
  Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
  Heavy with sand.
  • Poem: The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

• 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 obscene
  Catches kept his conscience clean.
  • Poem: The Drunken Fisherman

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)