Imagist poet, born in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA, the sister of Percival and A Lawrence Lowell. Privately educated, an unconventional member of the great Lowell dynasty, she began to write poetry in her late 20s, producing volumes of free verse which she named unrhymed cadence and polyphonic prose, as in Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914). She also wrote several critical volumes, and a biography of Keats.
Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
Personal life and career
Lowell was born into Boston's prominent Lowell family.
She herself never attended college because it was not deemed proper for a woman by her family, but she compensated for this with her avid reading, which led to near-obsessive book-collecting.
Lowell was lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell became lovers. 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 was an imposing figure who dressed in clothing considered manly, kept her hair cropped short, and wore a pince-nez.
Lowell's fetish for Keats is well-recorded—a doubtless absurdity for a self-proclaimed imagist. Pound, amongst many others, did not think of her as an imagist but merely a rich woman who was able to financially assist the publication of imagist poetry, which became weak after Pound's "exile" towards Vorticism.
Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925 at the age of 51. Forgotten for years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her work, in part because of its focus on lesbian themes and her collection of love poems addressed to Ada Dwyer Russell, but also because of its extraordinary, almost frightening, ability to breathe life into inanimate objects, such as in The Green Bowl, The Red Lacquer Music Stand, and Patterns.
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