Noted modernist and imagist Amy Lawrence Lowell was a consummate lecturer and conversationalist, as well as a joker and friend-maker among the great literary figures of her day. She enhanced her promotion of imagism as a viable alternative to traditional forms with the composition of over 600 poems. The sheer volume of verse mars her canon by the inclusion of mediocre works among such masterpieces as “Patterns” and “The Sisters,” a defense of female artistry. Until feminist criticism defended her place among early-twentieth-century poets, she was largely neglected, in part because homophobic critics rejected her bisexual and lesbian views on human relationships.
Amy Lowell was one of the prestigious Massachusetts Lowells and was a relative of James Russell Lowell, the first editor of Atlantic Monthly. She was born on February 9, 1874, in Brookline to aristocratic parents, Katherine Bigelow Lawrence and Augustus Lowell. Lowell’s mother tutored and educated her, and she completed a basic education at private schools in Boston and Brookline. Much of her learning derived from self-directed reading in the family’s vast library. At age 13, to aid a charity, she published a volume of juvenilia, Dream Drops, or Stories from Fairyland (1887), a token of the late-blooming artistry yet to emerge.
Lowell traveled across Europe before settling in the family manor, Sevenels, in 1903. Lowell published her first sonnet, “A Fixed Idea,” in Atlantic Monthly in 1910, followed by three more submissions and the translation of a play by Alfred de Musset, staged at a Boston theater.
Acclaimed for Keatsian verse in A Dome of Many-Colored Glass (1912), Lowell stopped mimicking other poets’ styles in 1914 and developed an independent voice, in part influenced by Ezra Pound, H. D., Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, and Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Following positive reception of her experimental “polyphonic prose,” her term for free verse, in Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914), she published in The Bookman, a respected New York monthly, and edited Some Imagist Poets, 1915–1917 (1917). A landmark work that sets the parameters of imagism, Some Imagist Poets names six requisites for imagism:
To employ common language that is precisely suited to the phrase
To search out new rhythms to express new moods
To welcome all subjects to the field of topics
To quell vagueness with exact images
To produce hard, clear verse free of confusion and distortion
To compress thought as though distilling the essence of meaning
Lowell’s own output in the new poetry genre of imagism included Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), Can Grande’s Castle (1918), Pictures of the Floating World (1919), which contains some of her best short works, and Legends (1921), a critically successful collection of narrative verse.
Lowell earned a reputation for violating conservative standards by flaunting her obesity, swearing, smoking cigars, and having a same-sex lover, actress Ada Dwyer Russell, with whom Lowell remained all her life. In addition to poetry, she published translations in Six French Poets: Studies in Contemporary Literature (1915), collected critical essays in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917) and satire in A Critical Fable (1922), a reprise of Fable for Critics, written by her illustrious New England ancestor, James Russell Lowell. For Fir-Flower Tablets (1921), a detailed collection of miniatures, she joined Florence Ayscough to translate Chinese verse into “chinoiseries,” restatements of Asian idiom in English.
During a period when she experienced eye strain and glandular imbalance, Lowell labored on a two-volume centennial biography, John Keats (1925). A substantial contribution to English criticism, the work began as a Yale address and flowered into exhaustive research. Historians blame the rigor of the insightful study for Lowell’s sudden death from cerebral hemorrhage on May 12, 1925, in Brookline. She was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Her posthumous volumes include What’s O’Clock (1925), which earned a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, East Wind (1926), Ballads for Sale (1927), Poetry and Poets (1930), and Complete Poetical Works (1955).
