Amy Lowell | |
|---|---|
_-_Bachrach.jpg) Lowell at Sevenels, circa 1916 | |
| Born | Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874-02-09)February 9, 1874 Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | May 12, 1925(1925-05-12) (aged 51) Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1925) |
| Partner | Ada Dwyer Russell (1912–1925)[a] |
Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of theimagist school. She posthumously won thePulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
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Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874, inBoston, Massachusetts, the daughter ofAugustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member of theBrahminLowell family, her siblings included the astronomerPercival Lowell, the educator and legal scholarAbbott Lawrence Lowell, andElizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren ofJohn Lowell and, on their mother's side, the grandchildren ofAbbott Lawrence.[4][5]
School was a source of considerable despair for the young Amy Lowell. She considered herself to be developing "masculine" and "ugly" features and she was a social outcast. She had a reputation among her classmates for being outspoken and opinionated.[6] At fifteen she wanted to be a photographer, poet, and coach racer.[7]
Lowell never attended college because her family did not consider it proper for a woman to do so. She compensated for this lack with avid reading and near-obsessivebook collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 (aged 28) after being inspired by a performance ofEleonora Duse in Europe. After beginning a career as a poet when she was well into her 30s, Lowell became an enthusiastic student and disciple of the art.[8]
Lowell was alesbian, and in 1912 she met the actressAda Dwyer Russell, who would become her lover. Russell is the subject of many of Lowell's more erotic works, most notably the love poems contained in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection ofPictures of the Floating World.[9] The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell metEzra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Pound considered Lowell's embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hijacking of the movement. Lowell has been linked romantically to writerMercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence of any contact between them is a brief correspondence about a planned memorial for Duse.
Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore apince-nez.
Lowell publicly smoked cigars, as newspapers of the day frequently mentioned.[6]: 96 A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight. PoetWitter Bynner once said, in a comment frequently misattributed toEzra Pound, that she was a "hippopoetess".[10]: 171 Her admirers defended her, however, even after her death. One rebuttal was written byHeywood Broun in his obituary tribute to Amy. He wrote, "She was upon the surface of things a Lowell, a New Englander and a spinster. But inside everything was molten like the core of the earth ... Given one more gram of emotion, Amy Lowell would have burst into flame and been consumed to cinders."[11]
Lowell died of acerebral hemorrhage in 1925, at the age of 51 and is buried atMount Auburn Cemetery.[12] The following year, she was awarded thePulitzer Prize for Poetry forWhat's O'Clock. That collection included the patriotic poem "Lilacs", whichLouis Untermeyer said was the poem of hers he liked best.
Her first published work appeared in 1910 inAtlantic Monthly. The first published collection of her poetry,A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later, in 1912. An additional group of uncollected poems was added to the volumeThe Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, published in 1955 with an introduction by Untermeyer, who considered himself her friend.
Though she sometimes wrotesonnets, Lowell was an early adherent to the "free verse" method of poetry and one of the major champions of this method. She defined it in her preface to "Sword Blades and Poppy Seed" in theNorth American Review for January 1917; in the closing chapter of "Tendencies in Modern American Poetry"; and also inThe Dial (January 17, 1918), as: "The definition ofvers libre is: a verse-formal based upon cadence. To understand vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader. Or, to put it another way, unrhymedcadence is "built upon 'organic rhythm,' or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. Free verse within its own law ofcadence has no absolute rules; it would not be 'free' if it had."[13]
Untermeyer writes that "She was not only a disturber but an awakener."[14] In many poems, Lowell dispenses with line breaks, so that the work looks like prose on the page. This technique she labeled "polyphonic prose".[15]
Throughout her working life, Lowell was a promoter of both contemporary and historical poets. Her bookFir-Flower Tablets was a poetical re-working of literal translations of the works of ancient Chinese poets, notablyLi Tai-po (701–762). Her writing also included critical works on French literature. At the time of her death, she was attempting to complete her two-volume biography ofJohn Keats (work on which had long been frustrated by the noncooperation ofF. Holland Day, whose private collection of Keatsiana includedFanny Brawne's letters to Frances Keats). Lowell wrote of Keats: "the stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius."[16]
Lowell published not only her own work, but also that of other writers. According to Untermeyer, she "captured" the Imagist movement fromEzra Pound. Pound threatened to sue her for bringing out her three-volume seriesSome Imagist Poets, and thereafter derisively called the American Imagists the "Amygist" movement. Pound criticized her as not an imagist, but merely a rich woman who was able to financially assist the publication of imagist poetry. She said that Imagism was weak before she took it up, whereas others said it became weak after Pound's "exile" towardsVorticism.
D.H. Lawrence dedicated his 1918 book New Poems "To Amy Lowell".[17]
Lowell wrote at least two poems about libraries—The "Boston Athenaeum"[18] and "The Congressional Library"[19]—during her career. A discussion of libraries also appears in her essay "Poetry, Imagination, and Education".[20]
Lowell's partner Ada Dwyer Russell was the subject of many of Lowell's romantic poems,[21] and Lowell wanted to dedicate her books to Russell, but Russell would not allow that, and relented only once for Lowell's biography ofJohn Keats, in which Lowell wrote, "To A.D.R., This, and all my books. A.L."[10]: 62 Examples of these love poems to Russell includethe Taxi,Absence,A Lady[22]: xxi In a Garden,Madonna of the Evening Flowers,[23]Opal,[24] andAubade.[25] Lowell admitted toJohn Livingston Lowes that Russell was the subject of her series of romantic poems titled "Two Speak Together".[26][27] Lowell's poems about Russell have been called the most explicit and elegant lesbian love poetry during the time between the ancientSappho and poets of the 1970s.[25] Most of the private correspondence in the form of romantic letters between the two were destroyed by Russell at Lowell's request, leaving much unknown about the details of their life together.[22]: 47
In the post-World War I years, Lowell was largely forgotten, but thewomen's movement in the 1970s andwomen's studies brought her back to light. According toHeywood Broun, however, Lowell showed little political interest infeminism. Within the realm of literature, though, she spoke highly of contemporary female poets such asEdna St. Vincent Millay.[28] She also drew inspiration from her female predecessors in poetry; her poem "The Sisters" explores in depth her thoughts onSappho,Elizabeth Barrett Browning, andEmily Dickinson.
Additional sources of interest in Lowell today come from theanti-war sentiment of the oft-taught poem "Patterns"; herpersonification of inanimate objects, as in "The Green Bowl", and "The Red Lacquer Music Stand"; and her lesbian themes, including the love poems addressed to Ada Dwyer Russell in "Two Speak Together."
Lowell's correspondence with her friendFlorence Ayscough, a writer and translator of Chinese literature, was compiled and published by Ayscough's husband ProfessorHarley Farnsworth MacNair in 1945.[29]
Amy Lowell.
Amy Lowell sword blades.
Amy Lowell.
Amy Lowell.
| Awards and achievements | ||
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| Preceded by | Cover ofTime magazine March 2, 1925 | Succeeded by |
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1922–1950) | ||
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