Amy Lowell
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.Collection: Art
Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.Collection: Dreams
Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness.Collection: Alone
All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.Collection: Dreams
Youth condemns; maturity condones.
Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.
Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls.
I am tired, beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it. And I scald alone, here, under the fire of the great moon.
In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.
Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give.
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
You are ice and fire the touch of you burns my hands like snow.
Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men.
How loud clocks can tick when a room is empty, and one is alone!Collection: Rooms
Oh! To be a butterfly Still, upon a flower, Winking with its painted wings, Happy in the hour.Collection: Flower
Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.Collection: Soul
When you came, you were like red wine and honey, and the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.Collection: Love
Everything mortal has moments immortalCollection: Moments
The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.Collection: Myopic
Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart.Collection: Life
Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.Collection: Powerful
Sexual love is the most stupendous fact of the universe, and the most magical mystery our poor blind senses know.Collection: Love Is
Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.Collection: Literature
I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Confused
Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.Collection: Cancer
Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Writing
Without poetry the soul and heart of man starves and dies.Collection: Heart
All recurring joy is pain refined.Collection: Pain
Happiness, to some, is elation; to others it is mere stagnation.Collection: Happiness
I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little inkdrops, And posting it.Collection: Missing You
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.Collection: Beautiful
Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me,and drench me in loneliness.Collection: Loneliness
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.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Stars
Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.Collection: Use
Brighter than fireflies upon the Uji River are your words in the dark, Beloved.Collection: Romantic
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.Collection: Sweet
I ask but one thing of you, only one, That always you will be my dream of you; That never shall I wake to find untrue All this I have believed and rested on, Forever vanished, like a vision gone Out into the night. Alas, how few There are who strike in us a chord we knew Existed, but so seldom heard its tone We tremble at the half-forgotten sound. The world is full of rude awakenings And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground, Yet still our human longing vainly clings To a belief in beauty through all wrongs. O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs!Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Intelligent
Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses All bent upon killing, because their "of courses" Are not quite the same.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: War
Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.Collection: Dream