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Amy Lowell

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Amy Lowell
Lowell at Sevenels, circa 1916
Lowell at Sevenels, circa 1916
BornAmy Lawrence Lowell
(1874-02-09)February 9, 1874
Brookline, Massachusetts,U.S.
DiedMay 12, 1925(1925-05-12)(aged 51)
Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S.
OccupationPoet
Notable awardsPulitzer Prize for Poetry(1925)
PartnerAda Dwyer Russell(1912–1925)[a]

Amy Lawrence Lowell(February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of theimagistschool, which promoted a return to classical values. She posthumously won thePulitzer Prize for Poetryin 1926.

Life[edit]

Lowell as a child

Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874, inBoston,Massachusetts, the daughter ofAugustus Lowelland 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 Lowelland, 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 Dusein 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 said to belesbian,and in 1912 she and actressAda Dwyer Russellwere reputed to be lovers. Russell is reputed to be the subject of Lowell's more erotic works, most notably the love poems contained in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection ofPictures of the Floating World.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.

Timecover from March 2, 1925, featuring Lowell

Lowell publicly smoked cigars, as newspapers of the day frequently mentioned.[6]: 96 A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight. PoetWitter Bynneronce said, in a comment frequently misattributed toEzra Pound,that she was a "hippopoetess".[9]: 171 Her admirers defended her, however, even after her death. One rebuttal was written byHeywood Brounin 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."[10]

Grave of Amy Lowell inMount Auburn Cemeteryin Cambridge, Massachusetts

Lowell died of acerebral hemorrhagein 1925, at the age of 51 and is buried atMount Auburn Cemetery.[11]The following year, she was awarded thePulitzer Prize for PoetryforWhat's O'Clock.That collection included the patriotic poem "Lilacs", whichLouis Untermeyersaid 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 Reviewfor January 1917; in the closing chapter of "Tendencies in Modern American Poetry"; and also inThe Dial(January 17, 1918), as: "The definition ofvers libreis: 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, unrhymedcadenceis "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 ofcadencehas no absolute rules; it would not be 'free' if it had. "[12]

Untermeyer writes that "She was not only a disturber but an awakener."[13]In many poems, Lowell dispenses with line breaks, so that the work looks like prose on the page. This technique she labeled "polyphonic prose".[14]

Throughout her working life, Lowell was a promoter of both contemporary and historical poets. Her bookFir-Flower Tabletswas 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."[15]

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.

Lowell wrote at least two poems about libraries—The "Boston Athenaeum"[16]and "The Congressional Library"[17]—during her career. A discussion of libraries also appears in her essay "Poetry, Imagination, and Education".[18]

Relationship with Ada Dwyer Russell[edit]

See also:Ada Dwyer Russell
Lowell's partnerAda Dwyer Russellwas the subject of many of her romantic poems.

Lowell's partner Ada Dwyer Russell was the subject of many of Lowell's romantic poems,[19]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."[9]: 62 Examples of these love poems to Russell includethe Taxi,Absence,A Lady[20]: xxi In a Garden,Madonna of the Evening Flowers,[21]Opal,[22]andAubade.[23]Lowell admitted toJohn Livingston Lowesthat Russell was the subject of her series of romantic poems titled "Two Speak Together".[24][25]Lowell's poems about Russell have been called the most explicit and elegant lesbian love poetry during the time between the ancientSapphoand poets of the 1970s.[23]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.[20]: 47 

Legacy[edit]

In the post-World War Iyears, Lowell was largely forgotten, but thewomen's movementin the 1970s andwomen's studiesbrought her back to light. According toHeywood Broun,however, Lowell personally argued againstfeminism.[26]

Additional sources of interest in Lowell today come from theanti-warsentiment of the oft-taught poem "Patterns"; herpersonificationof 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" and her poem "The Sisters", which addresses her female poetic predecessors.

Lowell's correspondence with her friendFlorence Ayscough,a writer and translator of Chinese literature, was compiled and published by Ayscough's husband ProfessorHarley Farnsworth MacNairin 1945.[27]

Works[edit]

  • "Fireworks".The Atlantic.Vol. 115. April 1915 – viaGoogle Books.

Books[edit]

Library resourcesabout
Amy Lowell
By Amy Lowell

Criticism[edit]

Anthology[edit]

Choral settings of poetry[edit]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^Sources:[1]: xl, xlii [2][3]

References[edit]

  1. ^Munich, Adrienne; Bradshaw, Melissa (November 30, 2002).Selected Poems of Amy Lowell.New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press.ISBN0813531284.
  2. ^History Project (Boston, Mass.) (1998),Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland,Beacon Press,p. 75,ISBN978-0-8070-7949-2
  3. ^Parker, Sarah (July 21, 2015).The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930.Routledge.p. 157.ISBN978-1848933866.
  4. ^Lowell, Delmar R.(1899).The Historic Genealogy of the Lowells of America from 1639 to 1899.Rutland, Vermont:Tuttle Publishing.p. 283 – viaGoogle Books.
  5. ^Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm; a Sketch of Korea.Ticknor and Company.1888.RetrievedApril 30,2013– viaGoogle Books.
  6. ^abGregory, Horace (1958).Amy Lowell: Portrait of the Poet in her Own Time.Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press – viaGoogle Books.
  7. ^Bradshaw, Melissa (Spring 2000)."Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification".Victorian Poetry.38(1).West Virginia University Press:142.doi:10.1353/vp.2000.0002.
  8. ^"Amy Lowell".Poetry Foundation.March 10, 2021.RetrievedMarch 10,2021.
  9. ^abBradshaw, Melissa; Munich, Adrienne (2004).Amy Lowell, American Modern.New Brunswick, New Jersey:Rutgers University Press.p. 62.ISBN0813533562– viaGoogle Books.
  10. ^Agarwal, Suman (2003).Sylvia Plath.New Delhi, India: Northern Book Centre. p. 12.ISBN978-81-7211-149-6– viaGoogle Books.
  11. ^Wilson, Scott (2016).Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons(3rd ed.).McFarland & Company.p. 2.ISBN978-0-7864-7992-4– viaGoogle Books.
  12. ^Livingston Lowes, John(1928).Conventions and Revolt in Poetry.Houghton Mifflin.p. 257 – viaGoogle Books.
  13. ^Alan Shucard; Fred Moramarco; William Sullivan (1990).Modern American poetry, 1865–1950.University of Massachusetts Press.p. 77.ISBN978-0-87023-720-1– viaGoogle Books.
  14. ^Michel Delville (1998).The American Prose Poem.University Press of Florida.p. 6.ISBN978-0-8130-1591-0– viaInternet Archive.
  15. ^Amy Lowell (1925).John Keats.Vol. 2.Houghton Mifflin.p. 152 – viaInternet Archive.
  16. ^Lowell, Amy (1912).A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass.Boston, Massachusetts:Houghton Mifflin.p. 115 – viaInternet Archive.
  17. ^Lowell, Amy."The Congressional Library".Library of Congress.
  18. ^Lowell, Amy (November 1917)."Poetry, Education, and Imagination".The North American Review.Vol. 205, no. 744. p. 773.JSTOR25121691– viaJSTOR.
  19. ^Castle, Terry (2005).The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall.Columbia University Press.p. 649.ISBN0231125119– viaGoogle Books.
  20. ^abRollyson, Carl (2013).Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography.Rowman & Littlefield.ISBN978-1442223929– viaGoogle Books.Preface reprinted at theauthor's website.
  21. ^Hamer, Diane (December 30, 2013)."The Love Songs of Amy Lowell".The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.21(1): 48.
  22. ^Faderman, Lillian."About Amy Lowell's Poetry".University of Illinois.
  23. ^abKarami, Siham (July–August 2016)."In the Manner of Amy Lowell"(PDF).The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.23(4): 39.
  24. ^Faderman, Lillian."Amy Lowell (1874–1925)".Georgetown University.
  25. ^Hamer, Diane Ellen (July 1, 2004)."Amy Lowell wasn't writing about flowers".The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.11(4) – viaGale.
  26. ^Sonja Samberger (2005).Artistic Outlaws.Berlin:LIT Verlag.pp. 43–44.ISBN978-3-8258-8616-5.
  27. ^Farnsworth MacNair, Harley,ed. (1946).Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell: Correspondence of a Friendship.University of Chicago Press– viaGoogle Books.

External links[edit]

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Awards and achievements
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