Amy Lowell Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
Sappho would speak, I think, quite openly,
And Mrs. Browning guard a careful silence,
But Emily would set doors ajar and slam them And love you for your speed of observation.

Amy Lowell
And now a month has passed and not a word have I had from you,
Not so much as a scrawl to say you could not write!

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

Amy Lowell
For hate is old as eagle peaks,
And hate is new as sunrise gulls,
And hate is ravening vulture beaks
Descending on a place of skulls.

Amy Lowell
Do we want laurels for ourselves most,
Or most that no one else shall have any?

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

Amy Lowell
Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart.

Amy Lowell
And the softness of my body will be guarded by embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

Amy Lowell
Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,
Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,
Lilac in me because I am New England.

Amy Lowell
What is the thing I would say to you
Ere the time when we can say nothing at all,
Neither you to me nor I to you,
And between us is sprung a smoky wall?

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

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

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

Amy Lowell
But a place is nothing, not even space,
Unless at its heart a figure stands.

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

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

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

Amy Lowell