Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell (1874-1925), American poet, critic, biographer, and flamboyant promoter of the imagist movement, was important in the "poetic renaissance" of the early 20th century.

Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Mass., of the prominent and wealthy Lowell family of Boston and counted among her ancestors the famous 19th-century poet James Russell Lowell. After being privately educated, she spent many years traveling abroad. Rebelling against her genteel, respectable upbringing, she delighted in smoking a big black cigar while expounding the most advanced and revolutionary esthetic theories of the pre—World War I avant-garde. Endowed with a remarkable flair for organization, she was highly influential in stimulating interest in the poetic experiments of the time. From 1915 through 1917 she edited an annual anthology of imagist poets.

Lowell published her first volume of verse, A Dome of Many-coloured Glass, in 1912. Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), her second volume, first showed the influence of imagist ideas. Curiously enough, in her critical comments she seemed to prefer the work of midwestern "nonimagists," such as Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay, to the more image-centered and cosmopolitan poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Though she borrowed often from Eliot in her poetry, she slighted him in her criticism and carried on a bitter feud with Pound.

Despite her enthusiasm for imagism, Lowell's best poems are closer in style to symbolist poetry than to imagist verse. "Patterns," her best-known poem, protests against puritan inhibitions and the repressive conventions of society. A moving feeling for the New England past pervades "Lilacs." Her unsigned Critical Fable (1922) was a contemporary redoing of James Russell Lowell's "Fable for Critics" and attempted to reproduce that earlier work's vernacular humor in judging contemporary poets. In this, Lowell was the first critic to note the "madness" of the characters in Robert Frost's North of Boston. She achieved another "first" by including a discussion of Wallace Stevens, who would not be recognized as a major poet until much later. Her denigration of Pound and Eliot as expatriates seems based more on patriotic than on literary principles. Perhaps her finest overall work was her biography of John Keats (1925).

A few of Lowell's separately published volumes of verse are Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916), Pictures of the Floating World (1919), What's o'Clock (1925), East Wind (1926), and Ballads for Sale (1927). Also of value are her Complete Poetical Works (1955) and Six French Poets (1915), a critical study.

Further Reading

Studies of Amy Lowell's life and work are S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle with Extracts from Her Correspondence (1935), and Horace Gregory, Amy Lowell (1958). She figures prominently in the critical study by Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (1931). Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present (1968), contains a section on her. □

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.

Amy Lowell 1874-1925, American poet, biographer, and critic, b. Brookline, Mass., privately educated; sister of Percival Lowell and Abbott Lawrence Lowell. In 1912 she published A Dome of Many-Colored Glass, a volume of conventional verse. The next year she went to England, where she met Ezra Pound and became identified with the imagists . After Pound abandoned the group, she became its leader and champion, publishing a three-volume anthology entitled Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917). Lowell's own poetry is particularly notable for its rendering of sensuous images. Her experiments with polyphonic prose, a free-verse form that combines prose and poetry, are considered unsuccessful. Among her volumes of poetry are Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916), Can Grande's Castle (1918), What's o'Clock (1925; Pulitzer Prize), East Wind (1926), and Ballads for Sale (1927). Her best-known poems are "Patterns" and "Lilacs." Lowell's perceptive and dynamic criticism includes Six French Poets (1915) and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917). Her most ambitious work is her two-volume biography of Keats (1925).

Bibliography: See biographies by H. Gregory (1958) and S. F. Damon (1935, repr. 1966).

Lowell, Amy Lawrence (1874–1925), American poet, took up Imagism and in 1913 and 1914 visited England, where she met Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and ‘H.D.’ ( Hilda Doolittle). Her volumes of verse, which include Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), and Can Grande's Castle (1918), show her experiments in what she called ‘polyphonic prose’. She became well known as a public figure, vast and cigar-smoking, through her lectures and readings in America.

Lowell, Amy (1874–1925) US poet and critic, sister of Percival Lowell. Her first volume was the sensuous A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912). Following the exit of Ezra Pound, Lowell became the leader of the imagism movement. Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) was an experiment with ‘polyphonic prose’, or free-verse.