#Robert Lowell

[metamorphesque]

"to endure!"

vincent van gogh ("trees and undergrowth") robert lowell [How will the heart endure?] vincent van gogh [I must endure bad times and the waters will rise, possibly as high as the lips and possibly even higher, how can I know beforehand? But I’ll fight my fight and sell my life dearly and try to win and pull through.] rainer maria rilke [To be loved means to be consumed. To love means to radiate with inexhaustible light. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.] joan didion [Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it.] elena ferrante [maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.] elena ferrante [I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.] han kang [The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.] victor frankl [What is to give light must endure burning.]

[mournfulroses]

Robert Lowell, from a letter featured in Robert Lowell In Love originally pub. in 2015

[apoemaday]

Epilogue

by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme — why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? 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. All’s misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

[lascitasdelashoras]

John Sokol: Retratos de autores en sus propias palabras.

George Bernard Shaw: "El camino del héroe"

James Joyce: "Ulises"

Robert Lowell: "History"

William Faulkner: "El sonido y la furia"

Robert Penn Warren : "Audubon"

James Tate: "Riven Doggeries"

John Keats: "Lamia"

Walt Whitman: "Hojas de hierba"

Eudora Welty: "Powerhouse"

Henrik Ibsen: "Hedda Gabler"

Dante Alighieri: "Infierno"

Jorge Luis Borges: "El milagro secreto"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "Salmos de vida"

[winged-cries]

robert lowell | franz wright

[papermenageriie]

From David Grene's review of Robert Lowell's translation of Aeschylus's Oresteia, cited in Wendy Doniger's translation of the Rig Veda

[derangedrhythms]

How will the heart endure?

Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle; from ‘Mr. Edwards and the Spider’

[headlightsforever]

Darkness honestly lived through is a place of wonder and life. So much has come from there.

Robert Lowell

[thequietabsolute]

Hounds of Love :: Caligula

[contremineur]

[...] the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning.

Robert Lowell, from Epilogue

via here – thank you, apoemaday

[wittgensteinsmistrust]

Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

Robert Lowell, Skunk Hour

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

J.R. Lowell ( pseud. of Jan Lowell & Robert Lowell ) - Daughter Of Darkness - Dell - 1973

[the-life--after]

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"I woke and knew I held a cigarette; / I looked, there was none, could have been none; / I slept off years before I woke again, / palming the floor, shaking the sheets."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

[classicliteratureprincess]

Recent writers I been introduced to -

Theodore Roethke

Elizabeth Bishop

Robert Hayden

Gwendolyn Brooks

Robert Lowell

W. D. Snodgrass

Eudora Welty

Sylvia Plath

Anne Sexton

James Baldwin

Lorraine Hansberry

Ralph Ellison

Amiri Baraka

[uwmspeccoll]

Justice, the Court System, and Drama in Athens

After ousting of the last tyrant of Athens, Hippias, in 510 BCE, and establishing Athenian Democracy, several new departments of governance needed to be created. One of the most crucial was that which presided over justice. Up to this point in Greek history, justice was the responsibility of the wronged party’s family. This commonly meant that if someone were killed, the victim's family would need to track down the murderer and kill them in return. This often resulted in a cycle of revenge with rival families, continuously thinning each other down to the point of non-existence. Given that such feuds tend to weaken a state rather than strengthen it, the Athenian government sought to take justice into the state's hands, thus leading to the establishment of the Athenian court.

This style of delivering justice had never been seen in the Greek world up to this point. The mythical origin of this system is reflected in Athenian playwright Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the only known surviving trilogy of dramas from the ancient Greek world. One of Special Collections’ several editions of these plays (our oldest is a Parisian printing in Greek published in 1552) is this one translated by the noted American poet Robert Lowell and published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux in 1978.

The story of the Oresteia is broken down into three plays, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. Agamemnon tells of the murder of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, by his wife Clytemnestra after his return from the ten-year Trojan War. The Libation Bearers relates how Agamemnon’s son Orestes returns years after his father’s murder to seek revenge against Clytemnestra on Apollo’s orders, but after killing her becomes the target of the Furies' merciless wrath. The Eumenides illustrates how the sequence of events in the trilogy ends up in the development of social order or a proper judicial system in Athenian society with Athena setting up a trial in Athens for Orestes, the first courtroom trial. Orestes is acquitted, which the Furies reluctantly accept, leading Athena to rename them the Eumenides, “The Gracious Ones.”  Athena then proclaims that all trials must henceforth be settled in court rather than being carried out personally. 

From this series of plays, Aeschylus was able to demonstrate his belief in how integral the Athenian justice system was to maintaining the strength and stability of Athens, rather than being subject to the whims of familial vengeance cycles.

View more of my Classics posts.

– LauraJean, Special Collections Undergraduate Classics Intern