Amy Lowell

Poet

• Born: February 9, 1874
• Birthplace: Brookline, Massachusetts
• Died: May 12, 1925
• Place of death: Brookline, Massachusetts

American poet

A leading poet of her day and leader of the Imagist movement, Lowell worked enthusiastically to popularize poetry and the other arts. She supported the work of other writers by editing collections of their works and by giving popular lectures on literature.

Area of achievement Literature

Early Life

Amy Lowell was a member of the Lowell family that arrived in America in 1639, twenty years after the arrival of the Mayflower, and rose to become one of the leading New England families. (It was the Cabots who spoke only to the Lowells, and the Lowells who spoke only to God.) Amy’s older brother Lawrence was president of Harvard University from 1909 to 1933. Amy was the last of seven children, five of whom survived infancy. Amy’s mother remained partially disabled for all of Amy’s life (she suffered from Bright’s disease), and Amy was raised mainly by her nurse-governess at Sevenels, the Lowells’ home in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Lowell did not have the companionship of other children and was often lonely, and as a result she took up the interests that her father and older brothers had. She preferred outdoor games and activities and was considered a tomboy by the age of eight.

Stimulated by the distinguished adults in her family and those who visited the Lowells, Lowell was precocious. She became a good conversationalist and could amuse her parents’ guests with puns. She liked to write, and at age ten she started a mimeographed magazine called The Monthly Story-Teller. Her mother encouraged her to put together a book for sale at a charity bazaar: Dream Drops.

Lowell was sent to private schools, but after attending some lectures at Radcliffe College, which she found boring, she left school at the age of seventeen. She educated herself by reading, both at home and at the Boston Athenaeum, a private library founded in 1807. She developed a special fondness for the English poet John Keats and later began a collection devoted to him. Her two older brothers had both published books (Percy on Asia and astronomy and Lawrence on government), and Lowell decided that she too would pursue a writing career. She experimented for several years with various literary forms, including plays, novels, and short stories.

After her mother died in 1895 and her father died in 1899, Lowell bought the ten-acre family Brookline estate from her siblings. She created a large library and designed a music room. She had the house electrified, and she bought a summer home in New Hampshire. She joined various civic boards and shocked the local gentry by speaking up in meetings (which was unusual for women in those days).

Lowell was plump and had always felt self-conscious about her weight, and in 1897 she may have been jilted by a suitor. She gave up thoughts of marriage and contented herself with friends. In 1912, she met the actor Ada Dwyer, and their friendship grew to such an extent that Dwyer quit the stage in 1914 to become Lowell’s full-time secretary and her companion until Lowell’s death.

Lowell had made many contacts in the social and political world by meeting and becoming friends with the many guests her family had entertained at Sevenels as she grew up. After the death of her parents, Lowell was helped in her endeavors not only by Dwyer but also by her many friends; for example, Carl Engel, a composer and music publisher. With his encouragement, she put on and acted in plays at Sevenels and organized monthly concerts. At her salons, she introduced her audiences to new music, including that of Béla Bartok, Claude Debussy, and Erik Satie.

Lowell’s position in a wealthy and influential family (whose wealth came mainly from the cotton mills that its members owned), combined with the support of her parents and older siblings, allowed her to have a larger role in determining the course of her life than many young women of her day had. The death of her parents by the time she was twenty-five relieved her of any need to secure their approval for her plans, and the wealth she inherited permitted her to live as she wished, writing, being a patron of the arts and salon hostess, or traveling wherever she wished. Thus, she was in a position to be much more independent than most other women of her era.

Life’s Work

In 1902, when she was twenty-eight, Amy Lowell was inspired by a performance of the European actress Eleonora Duse to write a poem, and she decided to focus on poetry. Lowell’s first published poem appeared in Atlantic Monthly in August of 1910. She organized her first book of poems and persuaded Houghton Mifflin to publish it. A Dome of Many-Colored Glass came out in October of 1912 to tepid reviews. The poems were not seen as very exciting. Lowell came across an article by Ezra Pound on a group of poets to which he belonged: the Imagists. She traveled to London to meet the poets in the group and began both to write in the Imagist style and to campaign for the recognition of the group in the United States.

Lowell worked hard at selling her work and that of other poets whom she admired. She read her poetry whenever she was asked, and she soon began to be in demand as a lecturer on both poetry and music. Her lectures were well prepared and were usually published, first as magazine articles and then as books (for example, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, 1917). She visited editors of magazines and her publishers, selling them on her poems and ideas for books. She worked at first with local magazines and publishers, such as Houghton Mifflin, but soon extended her forays to New York, where she worked with Macmillan. She edited several volumes of poems by Imagists (the first, Some Imagist Poets, appeared in 1915) and a volume on six French poets (Six French Poets, 1915), followed by several other similar volumes, the royalties from which Lowell delighted in dividing into portions and sending to the authors, some of whom desperately needed money.

Soon Lowell began to be noticed by the media. She had begun to smoke cigars, and her behavior made headlines in the New York Tribune. Lowell saw that this kind of publicity would help her establish a public image and contribute to the success of her poetry, so she cultivated the image, even though it was natural for her to behave in the way she did. She smoked, she bullied, and she stayed in bed till past noon, even receiving visitors there. Such behavior was most unusual for a woman of that era, but Lowell’s financial independence and social position led others to see her actions as interesting rather than shocking.

Lowell’s second volume of poems, Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds, made a splash in 1914. The poems had varied rhythms and versification, and the reviews came in angry, favorable, or puzzled. No one viewed her work as bland anymore. The criticism, rather than depressing her, made her ready to do battle to convert people to the “new poetry.” She hired two full-time secretaries. She wrote letters, ran dinner parties, worked on anthologies, lectured, and continued to write poems and give readings. Eventually, she was speaking to audiences of more than a thousand people at a time throughout the United States.

Although Lowell had suffered from occasional depressions and somatic disorders such as jaundice and gastritis (developed during a trip to Egypt to lose weight), she was not seriously ill until she developed a hernia while attempting to extricate her carriage from mud in 1916. From this time on, her health deteriorated rapidly. The injury and its complications required several operations, none of which satisfactorily resolved the problem (the practice of medicine at the time was severely limited in its treatment of internal problems), and she developed several symptoms of stress, perhaps as a result of the deaths of close relatives and fears of political action by the workers at the Lowell family cotton mills.

In the middle of the series of operations for her hernia, Lowell worked on a translation of Chinese poems into English (Fir-Flower Tablets, 1920) and on a book of poems about North American Indians (Legends, 1921). Critics liked Legends but disapproved of Fir-Flower Tablets.

She suffered a mild heart attack and retinal hemorrhages, and the hernia broke through again, but she kept working frenetically. In 1922, she determined to finish a biography of Keats she had begun to write, but first she wrote an anonymous spoof of modern poets (including herself), a hoax to which she did not admit for over a year (A Critical Fable, 1922). She was upset in 1922 when Edna St. Vincent Millay became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. (Lowell’s came posthumously, in 1926.) A final lecture tour was completed in January of 1923. The eleven-hundred-page manuscript on Keats (John Keats) finally reached the publisher in November of that year, and the biography was released in February, 1925, to good reviews in America but poor reviews in England, where they seemed to be jealous that an American could write a good biography on Keats.

By March, Lowell’s weight was down to 160 pounds from a high of 250. (She was only slightly more than five feet tall.) An operation to correct her hernia was scheduled for May, but the day before the operation, on May 12, 1925, Lowell had a stroke and died.

Significance

Although only a few of Amy Lowell’s poems are considered good enough to merit inclusion in modern anthologies, she was an accomplished poet of her day, if not the leading poet. She received a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1926, shortly after her death. In the 1920’s, Lowell was one of the most striking figures in American literature. She replaced Ezra Pound as the leader of the Imagist group, and she experimented with form and technique in poetry, becoming especially good at free verse. She is remembered particularly for her enthusiasm for the enterprise of poetry and for her efforts to promote it. She edited collections of works by authors whom she admired and gave lectures to large audiences across the country, attempting to arouse their enthusiasm for the arts. Her published essays established her as a literary critic, and her scholarly biography of Keats was received favorably. Her comfortable financial and social position permitted her a great deal of freedom to act, and she took advantage of that freedom to promote literary causes, including her own poetry.

Further Reading

Benvenuto, Richard. Amy Lowell. Boston: Twayne, 1985. This work contains a brief biography of Amy Lowell but consists mostly of a critical appraisal of her work, focusing on her prose, early poetry, narrative poetry, and lyrical works.

Coffman, Stanley K. Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry. New York: Octagon Books, 1972. Coffman reviews the history and development of the poets who became known as the Imagists, who were led first by Ezra Pound and then by Amy Lowell.

Damon, S. Foster. Amy Lowell: A Chronicle with Extracts from Her Correspondence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935. This is an early biography of Amy Lowell and a review of her work. Unlike later biographies, it contains long extracts from her letters.

Galvin, Mary E. Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Examines the work of Lowell and four other modernist writers who were lesbians.

Gould, Jean. Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and the Imagist Movement. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. This biography focuses on Lowell’s life, providing much information about her personal habits and day-to-day activities. It does not attempt a literary analysis or critical appraisal of her poetry or essays.

Heymann, C. David. American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert Lowell. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980. This book traces the history of the Lowells in America from their arrival in 1639 but concentrates on the lives of three members of the family, each of whom wrote poetry: James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), Amy Lowell (1874-1925), and Robert Lowell (1917-1977).

Munich, Adrienne, and Melissa Bradshaw, eds. Amy Lowell, American Modern. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Collection of essays analyzing Lowell’s life and work.

Ruihley, Glenn R. The Thorn of a Rose: Amy Lowell Reconsidered. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975. This work is both a biography and a critical appraisal of Amy Lowell’s writing.