Robert Lowell Quotes

“EB: 'Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he’d received from Dylan T[Thomas] before D’s last trip here [New York]—very clever, but it really can’t be published for a long, long time, he’s decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.—one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as 'A truck called F———.'

RL: 'Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.'

RL: 'I have just finished the Yeats Letters—900 & something pages—although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated.'

RL: 'Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then.'

EB: 'so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time.”
― Robert Lowell, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

“As he speaks, his eyes slither warily from one of us to another, reminding me of the Time Warner executives I once lunched with years ago, who seemed poised at all times between arrogance and deference, nervously calculating which to project. A line from a Robert Lowell poem comes to mind: “a savage servility/slides by on grease.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream