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Day by Day
Collected verses focus on the American poet's memories of family and school, marriage, recent life in England, and present home in Kent
137 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
6 people are currently reading
172 people want to read
About the author
Robert Lowell
182 books269 followersRobert Lowell, born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
December 11, 2021
Do I deserve credit
for not having tried suicide—
or am I afraid
the exotic act
will make me blunder,
4.5 stars
I was finally able to eschew the fear. It wasn’t a question of transcendence, but just simple escape and evasion. This verse is richly autobiographical and coldly piercing. Lowell’s nickname was Cal—apparently for Caliban or Caligula: an unfortunate epithet from his childhood. Cal gazes long into the abyss in this set; it isn’t just the shaving spiegel but the analyst’s couch and the constabulary pillory which is enacted. Homer and Cromwell are sought to give form to a spiritual Massachusetts homelessness.
Everyone please pursue this at once.
for not having tried suicide—
or am I afraid
the exotic act
will make me blunder,
4.5 stars
I was finally able to eschew the fear. It wasn’t a question of transcendence, but just simple escape and evasion. This verse is richly autobiographical and coldly piercing. Lowell’s nickname was Cal—apparently for Caliban or Caligula: an unfortunate epithet from his childhood. Cal gazes long into the abyss in this set; it isn’t just the shaving spiegel but the analyst’s couch and the constabulary pillory which is enacted. Homer and Cromwell are sought to give form to a spiritual Massachusetts homelessness.
Everyone please pursue this at once.
August 22, 2021
Robert Lowell left us with a wondrous body of work. DAY BY DAY is no exception. DAY BY DAY was Lowell’s swan song. There are lines in this collection that are simply masterful. Of course, the collection is not perfect. There are moments in which some of the poems are self indulgent. There are moments when there are personal references that only a handful of readers will get. Overall,
Lowell wrote as if he had nothing to fear. When a poem is good in the collection, it cuts like the sharpest of blades.
I certainly will be returning to this volume of poetry.
The poem “Epilogue” itself makes the volume worthy of reading.
Lowell wrote as if he had nothing to fear. When a poem is good in the collection, it cuts like the sharpest of blades.
I certainly will be returning to this volume of poetry.
The poem “Epilogue” itself makes the volume worthy of reading.
May 17, 2012
This one bored the shit out of me. I don't fucking care who you knew, Mr. Lowell. I don't fucking care.
Read
July 4, 2024Visited Houghton Library archives and got my hands on drafts of Lowell’s late poems with his handwritten notes and edits. Some poems were included multiple times in revised versions. Also multiple table of contents pages where I could see Lowell working through the ordering of the book—one with a ring of coffee left from his mug. And a surprise sketch of a wolf on the back of one of the poems.
April 5, 2011
Robert Lowell didn't ring my bells. It's not because it's free verse, but more the tail-off endings, the lack of grip, the detachment of these poems.
I did rather like his elegy for John Berryman, which ends with surprising sweetness:
I did rather like his elegy for John Berryman, which ends with surprising sweetness:
To my surprise, John,
I pray to not for you,
think of you not myself,
smile and fall asleep.
For me, redemption was found at the end of the book, with three poems Lowell translated or adapted. One is a little folktale called 'Rabbit, Weasel, and Cat', adapted from La Fontaine. One he calls a translation, due to its influence by another writer - it's a linkage of Mad King George and Richard Nixon.
The third is a translation of Sextus Propertius's 'Arethusa to Lycotas' - a wife writing to her husband away at the frontier wars. The translation made me want to seek out Ezra Pound, who's done a whole series of Propertius's poems. The poem has the voice, the intimacy, that I wanted elsewhere in the book (and, reminds me of Auden's 'Roman Wall Blues', which I've always had a soft spot for - I blame too much Kipling and Rosemary Sutcliff as a child).
Anyway - Arethusa to Lycotas ends like this:Is glory taking Bactra's walls by force,
or tearing the turban from a perfumed king,
while the bow twangs from their hypocrite flying horse,
and lead scatters like hailstones from the twisted slings?
When their young men are gone, and slavery heals
their widows, and the spear without a head
drags your triumphant horse's heels -
remember the vow that binds you to our bed.
If you come back to me by day or night,
and make us for a moment man and wife,
I'll bring your arms to the Capua Gate, and write:
From a girl grateful for her husband's life.
I might go back to Lowell's earlier work (the internet tells me to steer clear of the two decades that precede 'Day by Day') but I won't be rushing. Next up: William Faulkner.
October 29, 2008
Robert Lowell is OK. This book is OK.
While I acknowledge that this book has its moments (not including the random, horrible poem protesting abortion), I would, given the half-star option, rate this book at 2.5 stars. In my opinion, it's a bit overrated.
While I acknowledge that this book has its moments (not including the random, horrible poem protesting abortion), I would, given the half-star option, rate this book at 2.5 stars. In my opinion, it's a bit overrated.
January 7, 2017
I had Lowell recommended to me because of his local ties, and I enjoyed this volume. His poems are by and large quite dark, and introspective. He sometimes seems lost in himself, but has a beautiful lyric quality and makes very keen observations.
July 27, 2007
Excellent.
September 8, 2007
Beautiful.
Currently reading
April 24, 2009Read and currently re-reading. I go back to this book of poems during times of transition in my life.
January 11, 2023
Appearing shortly before his death from a heart attack in 1977, Day By Day marks the final collection of poetry published by Robert Lowell in his lifetime. Perhaps the most striking quality to initially impress even a casual reader here, is the valedictory tone present in much of the book's early verse. Even (and especially) with hindsight the effect can be disturbing.
As someone whose fascination with history, (both personal/familial and more general), was ever active, Lowell's work was always driven as much by the backward gaze as by the contemporary encounter but the underlying theme of encroaching mortality has never been sharper, more personal, or more consistent. In the poem "Death of a Critic" for instance, Lowell acknowledges the transient and meaningless nature of his own early criticism of his contemporaries ("buried in the Little Magazines", p. 48) in terms both natural and mortal:
"My maiden reviews,/once the verbal equivalent of murder,/are now a brief compact pile,/almost as old as I./They fall apart swallowing,/their stiff pages/chip like dry leaves/flying the tree that fed them."
If one were not limited by space and the shortcomings of technology a fully developed review of Lowell's treatment of this theme could be offered. For the moment I offer a final, (and in my opinion best), example of Lowell's tart and uncharacteristically funny summation of aging toward death. In "Ulysses and Circe" (p.7) an ironic meditation, through classical masks, of the anxieties arising from his third marriage to Lady Caroline Blackwood Lowell says, "Age is the bilge/we cannot shake from the mop."
The bad news. There are a handful poems that, in my opinion, don't work and when this happens the net effect is like a nightmarishly long lunch with a friend in crisis, telling you ALL their problems; the flat moments are far and few between however. The book's later verses, focusing as they do on marital difficulty, his wife's physical ailments and Lowell's recurrent mental illness, are very frequently compelling as well and a good introduction to poetry in the "Confessional" mode (although Lowell himself would have loathed that description). Don't let it bother you. Read this book.
As someone whose fascination with history, (both personal/familial and more general), was ever active, Lowell's work was always driven as much by the backward gaze as by the contemporary encounter but the underlying theme of encroaching mortality has never been sharper, more personal, or more consistent. In the poem "Death of a Critic" for instance, Lowell acknowledges the transient and meaningless nature of his own early criticism of his contemporaries ("buried in the Little Magazines", p. 48) in terms both natural and mortal:
"My maiden reviews,/once the verbal equivalent of murder,/are now a brief compact pile,/almost as old as I./They fall apart swallowing,/their stiff pages/chip like dry leaves/flying the tree that fed them."
If one were not limited by space and the shortcomings of technology a fully developed review of Lowell's treatment of this theme could be offered. For the moment I offer a final, (and in my opinion best), example of Lowell's tart and uncharacteristically funny summation of aging toward death. In "Ulysses and Circe" (p.7) an ironic meditation, through classical masks, of the anxieties arising from his third marriage to Lady Caroline Blackwood Lowell says, "Age is the bilge/we cannot shake from the mop."
The bad news. There are a handful poems that, in my opinion, don't work and when this happens the net effect is like a nightmarishly long lunch with a friend in crisis, telling you ALL their problems; the flat moments are far and few between however. The book's later verses, focusing as they do on marital difficulty, his wife's physical ailments and Lowell's recurrent mental illness, are very frequently compelling as well and a good introduction to poetry in the "Confessional" mode (although Lowell himself would have loathed that description). Don't let it bother you. Read this book.
July 17, 2024
His last volume of poetry.
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
from Epilogue
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
from Epilogue
Read
July 26, 2024The resident doctor said,
“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm—
how can we help you?”
I asked,
“These days of only poems and depression—
what can I do with them?
Will they help me notice
what I cannot bear to look at?”, “Notice,” p. 118
“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm—
how can we help you?”
I asked,
“These days of only poems and depression—
what can I do with them?
Will they help me notice
what I cannot bear to look at?”, “Notice,” p. 118
October 7, 2025
En su día a día resuena el oleaje de Ulises que vuelve y el estanque artificial que mira al paso en camino hacia Dublín, la tierra de sus ancestros. Algo de Lowell bebió D. Walcott. El cisne es un costoso juguete de plumas.🪶
June 26, 2020
"En época de crisis,
todas nuestras tajantes, drásticas decisiones
han hecho de nosotros
los seres fugitivos que ahora somos."
RL
todas nuestras tajantes, drásticas decisiones
han hecho de nosotros
los seres fugitivos que ahora somos."
RL
November 14, 2020
Day by Day
Conscious
Subconscious
Reality
Illusion
Is a spark for thoughts
Conscious
Subconscious
Reality
Illusion
Is a spark for thoughts
February 2, 2023
3.5 stars
February 10, 2023
no diminishment in power, still some heartrending passages here
February 15, 2023
Love Lowell, Love New England, simple as
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews