Lowell, Amy (Lawrence)

Lowell, Amy [Lawrence] (1874–1925), collateral descendant of James Russell Lowell, was born in Brookline, Mass. Her first book, A Dome of Many‐Coloured Glass (1912), lacks the vivid individuality and technical experimentation that characterize the poetry in Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916), Can Grande's Castle (1918), Pictures of the Floating World (1919), and Legends (1921).

In 1913 Miss Lowell became identified with the movement of Imagism, and after Ezra Pound abandoned the group she was its dominating force. Her technical experimentation includes not only the modes of the Imagists but also polyphonic prose, a free‐verse method of which she and John Gould Fletcher were the leading exponents. Although her work attracted wide attention, it has been criticized as dealing too exclusively with sensual images, particularly visual ones, and as neglecting emotional values. Her distinctive personality informs A Critical Fable (1922), a witty Who's Who of contemporary poets patterned after A Fable for Critics. Her biographical study John Keats (1925) has been called an uncritical amassing of materials, although it is distinguished by the zest that marks all her work. Among the most noted of her poems are Patterns, published in Men, Women, and Ghosts, a free‐verse dramatic monologue on the clash between desire and convention within the mind of a woman of the 18th century, and Lilacs, an Imagistic descriptive piece published in What's O'Clock? (1925), a volume for which she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize (1926).

Her other books of verse include East Wind (1926) and Ballads for Sale (1927), and she wrote two further critical studies, Six French Poets (1915) and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917). Her correspondence with Florence Ayscough about translations from the Chinese (Fir‐Flower Tablets, (1921) was published in 1946.