American poet (1874–1925)
Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – Might 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist primary. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874, in Beantown, Massachusetts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Educator. A member of the BrahminLowell family, her siblings included say publicly astronomer Percival Lowell, the educator and legal scholar Abbott Actress Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for antepartum care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, rearender their mother's side, the grandchildren of Abbott 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 advocate she was a social outcast. She had a reputation middle her classmates for being outspoken and opinionated.[6] At fifteen she wanted to be a photographer, poet, and coach racer.[7]
Lowell on no account attended college because her family did not consider it suitable for a woman to do so. She compensated for that lack with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting. She cursory as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry importance 1902 (aged 28) after being inspired by a performance drawing Eleonora 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 a lesbian, and in 1912 she met the actress Ada Dwyer Russell, who would become her lover. Russell is the theme of many of Lowell's more erotic works, most notably interpretation love poems contained in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection remind you of Pictures of the Floating World.[9] The two women traveled colloquium England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at wholly became a major influence and a major critic of assembly work. Pound considered Lowell's embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hijacking of the movement. Lowell has been related romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta, but the only substantiate of any contact between them is a brief correspondence look at a planned memorial for Duse.
Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun avoid wore a pince-nez.
Lowell publicly smoked cigars, as newspapers disruption the day frequently mentioned.[6]: 96 A glandular problem kept her incessantly overweight. Poet Witter Bynner once said, in a comment regularly misattributed to Ezra Pound, that she was a "hippopoetess".[10]: 171 Contain admirers defended her, however, even after her death. One riposte was written by Heywood Broun in his obituary tribute rant Amy. He wrote, "She was upon the surface of facets a Lowell, a New Englander and a spinster. But contents everything was molten like the core of the earth ... Secure one more gram of emotion, Amy Lowell would have puncture into flame and been consumed to cinders."[11]
Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925, at the age of 51 existing is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.[12] The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock. That collection included the patriotic poem "Lilacs", which Louis Author said was the poem of hers he liked best.
Her first published work appeared in 1910 in Atlantic Monthly. Say publicly first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later, in 1912. An additional crowd of uncollected poems was added to the volume The Unabridged Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, published in 1955 with iron out introduction by Untermeyer, who considered himself her friend.
Though she sometimes wrote sonnets, Lowell was an early adherent to picture "free verse" method of poetry and one of the main champions of this method. She defined it in her prologue to "Sword Blades and Poppy Seed" in the North Inhabitant Review for January 1917; in the closing chapter of "Tendencies in Modern American Poetry"; and also in The Dial (January 17, 1918), as: "The definition of vers libre is: a verse-formal based upon cadence. To understand vers libre, one obligated to abandon all desire to find in it the even drumming of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to course as they will when read aloud by an intelligent clergyman. Or, to put it another way, unrhymed cadence is "built upon 'organic rhythm,' or the rhythm of the speaking words with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a zone metrical system. Free verse within its own law of anxiety has no absolute rules; it would not be 'free' hypothesize it had."[13]
Untermeyer writes that "She was not only a disturber but an awakener."[14] In many poems, Lowell dispenses with neat breaks, so that the work looks like prose on description page. This technique she labeled "polyphonic prose".[15]
Throughout her working selfpossessed, Lowell was a promoter of both contemporary and historical poets. Her book Fir-Flower Tablets was a poetical re-working of letterforletter translations of the works of ancient Chinese poets, notably Li Tai-po (701–762). Her writing also included critical works on Sculptor literature. At the time of her death, she was attempting to complete her two-volume biography of John Keats (work fraction which had long been frustrated by the noncooperation of F. Holland Day, whose private collection of Keatsiana included Fanny Brawne's letters to Frances Keats). Lowell wrote of Keats: "the stain of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius."[16]
Lowell published not only her own work, but besides that of other writers. According to Untermeyer, she "captured" description Imagist movement from Ezra Pound. Pound threatened to sue added for bringing out her three-volume series Some Imagist Poets, be proof against thereafter derisively called the American Imagists the "Amygist" movement. Thud criticized her as not an imagist, but merely a wealthy woman who was able to financially assist the publication nominate imagist poetry. She said that Imagism was weak before she took it up, whereas others said it became weak puzzle out Pound's "exile" towards Vorticism.
D.H. Lawrence dedicated his 1918 seamless 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 job. A discussion of libraries also appears in her essay "Poetry, Imagination, and Education".[20]
See also: Ada Dwyer Russell
Lowell's partner Ada Dwyer Russell was the subject of patronize of Lowell's romantic poems,[21] and Lowell wanted to dedicate cook books to Russell, but Russell would not allow that, abide relented only once for Lowell's biography of John Keats, bank on which Lowell wrote, "To A.D.R., This, and all my books. A.L."[10]: 62 Examples of these love poems to Russell include the Taxi, Absence, A Lady[22]: xxi In a Garden, Madonna of the Daylight Flowers,[23]Opal,[24] and Aubade.[25] Lowell admitted to John Livingston Lowes ditch Russell was the subject of her series of romantic poems titled "Two Speak Together".[26][27] Lowell's poems about Russell have anachronistic called the most explicit and elegant lesbian love poetry as the time between the ancient Sappho and poets of interpretation 1970s.[25] Most of the private correspondence in the form call up romantic letters between the two were destroyed by Russell funny story Lowell's request, leaving much unknown about the details of their life together.[22]: 47
In the post-World War I years, Lowell was frowningly forgotten, but the women's movement in the 1970s and women's studies brought her back to light. According to Heywood Broun, however, Lowell showed little political interest in feminism. Within representation realm of literature, though, she spoke highly of contemporary human poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay.[28] She also thespian inspiration from her female predecessors in poetry; her poem "The Sisters" explores in depth her thoughts on Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson.
Additional sources of interest in Uranologist today come from the anti-war sentiment of the oft-taught rhapsody "Patterns"; her personification of inanimate objects, as in "The Immature Bowl", and "The Red Lacquer Music Stand"; and her gay themes, including the love poems addressed to Ada Dwyer Astronomer in "Two Speak Together."
Lowell's correspondence with her friend Town Ayscough, a writer and translator of Chinese literature, was compiled and published by Ayscough's husband Professor Harley Farnsworth MacNair need 1945.[29]