Quote

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.

Amy Lowell

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Amy Lowell
Age: 51 †
Born: 1874
Born: February 9
Died: 1925
Died: May 12
Poet
Socialite
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Amy Lawrence Lowell
Mind
Illusion
Minors
Tuned
Things
Sorrow
Chords
Baffled
Circumstances
Ache
Vibrate
Wall
Beating
Stuffed
Passion
Searching
Readily
Voice
Strings
Illusions
Words
Walls
Minor
Heart
Wings
Circumstance

More quotes by Amy Lowell

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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.
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A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men.
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When trying to explain anything, I usually find that the Bible, that great collection of magnificent and varied poetry, has said it before in the best possible way.
Amy Lowell
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Rapture's self is three parts sorrow.
Amy Lowell
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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
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Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.
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Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me,and drench me in loneliness.
Amy Lowell
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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.
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Oh! To be a butterfly Still, upon a flower, Winking with its painted wings, Happy in the hour.
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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.
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Underneath my stiffened gown Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin, A basin in the midst of hedges grown So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding, But she guesses he is near, And the sliding of the water Seems the stroking of a dear Hand upon her.
Amy Lowell
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Love is a game-yes? I think it is a drowning.
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Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses All bent upon killing, because their of courses Are not quite the same.
Amy Lowell
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Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart.
Amy Lowell
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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.
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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.
Amy Lowell
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To-night when the full-bellied moon swallows the stars. Grant that I know.
Amy Lowell
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The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.
Amy Lowell
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Youth condemns maturity condones
Amy Lowell
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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.
Amy Lowell