Amy Lowell

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Amy Lowell

(born Feb. 9, 1874, Brookline, Mass., U.S. — died May 12, 1925, Brookline) U.S. critic and poet. Born into the prominent Lowell family of Boston, she devoted herself to poetry at age 28 but published nothing until 1910. Her first volume, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912), was succeeded by Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), which included her first poems in free verse and what she called "polyphonic prose." She became a leader of Imagism and was noted for her vivid and powerful personality and her scorn of conventional behaviour. Her other works include Six French Poets (1915), Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), and John Keats, 2 vol. (1925).

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Biography: Amy Lowell

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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.

Columbia Encyclopedia: Amy Lowell

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Lowell, Amy, 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).

Works: Works by Amy Lowell

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(1874-1925)

1912	A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass. Lowell's first book is noteworthy for its conventional poems, which contrast with her subsequent experimental poetry.
1914	Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. The first of two volumes of Lowell's experiments in "polyphonic prose," a version of free verse approximating the "unrhymed cadence" of speech. Can Grande's Castle would follow in 1918.
1915	Some Imagist Poets. The first of three anthologies of Imagist poetry, issued from 1915 to 1917, under the supervision of Amy Lowell. Lowell's preface provides the credo of Imagism (language of common sense, new rhythms, absolute freedom in the choice of subjects, centrality of the image, hard and clear poetry, shunning of the blurred or indefinite, and concentration as the essence of poetry). The anthologies help popularize the movement and fan controversy over its subjects and techniques.
1916	Men, Women, and Ghosts. Lowell's collection of narrative poems, scenes, and monologues is praised by D. H. Lawrence, who cites as particular achievements "The Cremona Violin," "Reaping," and "Hoops."
1917	Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. Having produced an earlier critical volume, Six French Poets (1915), Lowell critiques six American poets --Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and John Gould Fletcher--while tracing the change in outlook and method that characterizes their art.
1918	Can Grande's Castle. In this collection of Lowell's experimental "polyphonic prose," the longest work is "The Bronze Horses," depicting scenes in Rome, Constantinople, and Venice through the centuries from the perspective of the horses that adorn the façade of St. Mark's in Venice.
1919	Pictures of the Floating World. Lowell's collection contains her adaptations of Chinese and Japanese verse forms and recent lyrics in her experimental "polyphonic" style.
1921	Legends. This collection of dramatic poems based on the folklore of different countries prompts poet Mark Van Doren to declare it "incomparably the best of Amy Lowell so far."
1922	A Critical Fable. Lowell's witty verse criticism of contemporary poets is patterned on James Russell Lowell's Fable for Critics (1848) and includes assessments of H.D., T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg.
1925	John Keats. The poet's immense, two-volume, virtually day-to-day record of Keats's life is sustained by Lowell's characteristic enthusiasm and poetical insights.
1925	What's O'Clock. The first of three posthumously published collections is awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It would be followed by East Wind (1926) and Ballads for Sale (1927).

Quotes By: Amy Lowell

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Quotes:

"Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls."

"Moon! Moon! am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness."

"Even Pain pricks to livelier living."

"A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men."

"All books are either dreams or swords."

"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."

See more famous quotes by Amy Lowell

Wikipedia: Amy Lowell

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Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007)

Amy Lawrence Lowell
Born	Amy Lawrence Lowell February 9, 1874(1874-02-09) Brookline, Massachusetts
Died	May 12, 1925 (aged 51)
Occupation	Poet
Notable award(s)	Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874—May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

1 Personal life
2 Career
3 Literary Criticism
4 Altercation with F. Holland Day
5 Legacy
6 Works
7 References
8 External links
9 Publication

Personal life

Lowell was born into Brookline's prominent Lowell family. One brother, Percival Lowell, was a famous astronomer who predicted the existence of the dwarf planet Pluto and believed the canals on Mars showed it hosted living intelligence; another brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, served as president of Harvard University.

She never attended college because her family did not consider it proper for a woman, but she compensated for this with avid reading and near-obsessive book-collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe.

Lowell was said to be lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell were reputed to be lovers. Russell is reputed to be the subject of her more erotic work, most notably the love poems contained in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection of Pictures of the Floating World. The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Lowell has been linked romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence that they knew each other at all is the brief correspondence between them about a memorial for Duse that never took place.

Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925 at the age of 51. The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock. That collection included the patriotic poem "Lilacs", which Untermeyer said was the poem of hers he liked best.

Career

Her first published work appeared in 1910 in Atlantic 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 volume The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, published in 1955 with an introduction by Louis Untermeyer, who considered himself her friend.

Though she sometimes wrote sonnets, Lowell was an early adherent to the "free verse" method of poetry and one of the major champions of this method. Untermeyer writes that "She was not only a disturber but an awakener."^[1] In many poems she dispenses with line breaks so that the work looks like prose on the page. This technique she labeled "polyphonic prose".^[2]

Throughout her working life Lowell was a promoter of both contemporary and historical poets. Her book Fir-Flower Poets was a poetical re-working of literal translations of the works of ancient Chinese poets, notably Li Tai-po (A.D. 701-762). Her writing also included critical works on French literature. When she died she was attempting to complete her two-volume biography of John Keats. Writing of Keats, Lowell said that "The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius."^[3]

Literary Criticism

Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez. She smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that poet Witter Bynner once said, in a cruel comment repeated by Ezra Pound and thereafter commonly misattributed to him, that she was a "hippopoetess."^[4]

Lowell not only published her own work but also that of other writers. According to Untermyer, she "captured" the Imagist movement from Ezra Pound. Pound threatened to sue her for bringing out her three-volume series Some Imagist Poets, and thereafter 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" towards Vorticism.

Altercation with F. Holland Day

Lowell was frustrated in composing her biography of Keats by the famous publisher and photographer, F. Holland Day. Day, alongside an unrivalled possession of Keatsiana, possessed exclusive copies of Fanny Brawne's letters to Keats. Fanny was the woman whom Keats had unsuccessfully pursued and the letters were therefore of considerable biographical interest. Lowell, who hoped to publish the definitive volume of biography, was forced to pursue a reluctant and rather mischevously reticent Day for these artefacts with little success.

Legacy

Grave of Amy Lowell in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts

In the post-World War II years, Lowell, like other women writers, was largely forgotten, but with the renaissance of the women's movement in the 1970s, women's studies brought her back to light. According to Heywood Broun, however, Lowell personally argued against feminism.^[5]

Additional sources of interest in Lowell today come from the anti-war sentiment of the oft-taught poem "Patterns"; her personification 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" and her poem "The Sisters" which addresses her female poetic predecessors.

Works

"Fireworks". The Atlantic Monthly 115. April 1915. http://books.google.com/books?id=IGsAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA512&lpg=PA512&dq=amy+lowell+atlantic+monthly&source=bl&ots=Ofc8kkEU97&sig=wHJgovgg1bpdOhwRtZLapSCPf9E&hl=en&ei=2jsjSpC_F4fGMpXD5aEJ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PPA512,M1.

References

^ Alan Shucard, Fred Moramarco, William Sullivan (1990). Modern American poetry, 1865-1950. University of Massachusetts Press. p. 77. ISBN 9780870237201. http://books.google.com/books?id=N0AtxcoLkC8C&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=Untermeyer+She+was+not+only+a+disturber+but+an+awakener&source=bl&ots=TCQJS6yYUO&sig=Q3ndTfeFZmwsedIw5CaniZ7o3Ko&hl=en&ei=DEQjSsjbEYm0NMaaqZ4J&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#PPA77,M1.
^ Michel Delville (1998). The American prose poem. University Press of Florida. p. 6. ISBN 9780813015910. http://books.google.com/books?id=rmGBWk1iGzwC&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=lowell+polyphonic+prose&source=bl&ots=Vanf9h9btV&sig=fV3YNF8vDu4po4CBRtk_4F2TnSU&hl=en&ei=GkUjSvCjOIPoNKuP3a8J&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6.
^ Amy Lowell (1925). John Keats. II. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY. p. 152. http://www.archive.org/stream/johnkeatsvolumei009666mbp/johnkeatsvolumei009666mbp_djvu.txt.
^ Adrienne Munich, Melissa Bradshaw (2004). Amy Lowell, American modern. Rutgers University Press. p. 171. ISBN 9780813533568. http://books.google.com/books?id=u5AXdTOuGy4C&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=%22hippopoetess.%22+Witter+Bynner&source=bl&ots=RTssPTm47j&sig=jOA3nFrMrFDtZlQpJiU02fSP74o&hl=en&ei=ajojSvTLNY2uMrTehJ4J&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5.
^ Sonja Samberger (2005). Artistic outlaws. Berlin-Hamburg-Münster: LIT Verlag. p. 43-44. ISBN 9783825886165. http://books.google.com/books?id=DKNJtTw8V5sC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=Heywood+Broun++Lowell+feminism.&source=bl&ots=v8ZhvH2S-N&sig=lkTXiY5Kcics6nPhSXwO4cE0CRk&hl=en&ei=9kAjSs-3FIvCM5y1-aYJ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PPA43,M1.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Amy Lowell

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Amy Lowell

Works by Amy Lowell at Project Gutenberg
Poems by Amy Lowell An extensive collection of Lowell's poetry.
Poetry or parody? A quiz.
March 26, 1916, New York Times, How Does the New Poetry Differ from the Old?; Amy Lowell Laments the Lack of Authoritative Criticism in America -- Says No One Should Make a Living by Writing

Publication

''Selected Poems of Amy Lowell'', ed. Melissa Bradshaw and Adrienne Munich, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

''Amy Lowell, American Modern: Critical Essays'', ed. Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw, New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 2004.

"Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification," ''Victorian Poetry'' Volume 38, No. 1 (Spring 2000), 141-169. [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_poetry/v038/38.1bradshaw.html]

Naoki Ohnishi, ed. Amy Lowell: Complete Poetical Works and Selected Writings in 6 vols.. Kyoto: Eureka Press. ISBN 9784902454291.
The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell with an introduction by Louis Untermeyer. Boston, Massachusetts: The Houghton Mifflin Company. (The Riverside Press, Cambridge), 1955.
Amy Lowell: Coｍｐlete Poetical Works and Selected Writings, 6 vols., Eureka Press at www.aplink.co.jp

Awards and achievements
Preceded by Owen D. Young	Cover of Time Magazine 2 March 1925	Succeeded by Nicholas Longworth

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		Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
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		Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more
		Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
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