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:
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To employ common language that is precisely suited to the phrase
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To search out new rhythms to express new moods
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To welcome all subjects to the field of topics
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To quell vagueness with exact images
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To produce hard, clear verse free of confusion and distortion
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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.
