Amy Lowell

Lore & Background

Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. Her siblings included astronomer Percival Lowell, educator Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and prenatal care activist Elizabeth Lowell Putnam. School was a source of despair; she considered herself developing 'masculine' and 'ugly' features and was a social outcast. She never attended college because her family did not consider it proper for a woman to do so, compensating with avid reading and book collecting. She lived as a socialite and traveled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after seeing Eleonora Duse perform in Europe.

Lowell was a lesbian, and in 1912 she met actress Ada Dwyer Russell, who became her lover and the subject of many of her erotic works, notably the love poems in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection of *Pictures of the Floating World*. The two traveled to England, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who became both a major influence and critic. Pound considered Lowell's embrace of Imagism a hijacking of the movement and derisively called the American Imagists the 'Amygist' movement. Lowell publicly smoked cigars, and a glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight. Poet Witter Bynner called her a 'hippopoetess', a comment often misattributed to Pound.

Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925 at age 51 and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. The following year she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for *What's O'Clock*, which included the patriotic poem 'Lilacs'. Her first published work appeared in 1910 in *Atlantic Monthly*, and her first collection, *A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass*, appeared in 1912. She was an early adherent to free verse, which she defined as 'a verse-formal based upon cadence.' She also developed 'polyphonic prose', dispensing with line breaks so that work looks like prose on the page.

Reader's Guide

Amy Lowell's significance lies in her role as a central figure in the imagist movement and a champion of free verse. She 'captured' the Imagist movement from Ezra Pound, according to Louis Untermeyer, and published the three-volume series *Some Imagist Poets*, which Pound threatened to sue over. Her poetry includes explicit lesbian love poems to Ada Dwyer Russell, considered the most elegant such work between Sappho and the 1970s. After being largely forgotten in the post-World War I years, the women's movement of the 1970s and women's studies revived interest in her work. Today she is studied for her anti-war poem 'Patterns', her personification of inanimate objects, and her lesbian themes. She also promoted contemporary and historical poets, re-working literal translations of ancient Chinese poets in *Fir-Flower Tablets* and writing a two-volume biography of John Keats. D.H. Lawrence dedicated his 1918 book *New Poems* 'To Amy Lowell'.

Did You Know?

• She publicly smoked cigars, a fact frequently mentioned in newspapers of the day.
• Her partner Ada Dwyer Russell destroyed most of their romantic correspondence at Lowell's request.
• Lowell wrote at least two poems about libraries: 'Boston Athenaeum' and 'The Congressional Library'.