Amy Lowell Biography Quotes 14 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Amy Lowell was born in 1874 in Brookline, Massachusetts, into the prominent Lowell family, long associated with Boston civic life and culture. Raised in comfort and surrounded by books at the family home, often called Sevenels, she received a thorough private education rather than a formal college degree, a path consistent with her family's traditions for daughters of her class at the time. Two of her older brothers became well known: Percival Lowell, the astronomer whose observatory work stirred public fascination with the planet Mars, and Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who served as president of Harvard University. The intellectual atmosphere they shared, along with the expectations of a public-minded Boston Brahmin household, shaped Lowell's lifelong belief that literature should be both exacting in craft and engaged with the wider world.

Apprenticeship and First Books
Lowell came to serious poetry later than many of her contemporaries, but once she committed, she moved decisively. She read widely, kept an extensive personal library, and began publishing in magazines, including Poetry, the Chicago journal founded by Harriet Monroe that became a crossroads for modern verse. Her first collection, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912), announced a new voice steeped in literary tradition yet alert to fresh rhythms and subjects. The book was followed by Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), a volume that sharpened her reputation for sensuous imagery, urbanity, and experiments with cadence and line. As her stature grew, she traveled and lectured, taking on a visible public role as defender and interpreter of contemporary poetry.

Imagism and Advocacy
Lowell is most closely associated with Imagism, the early twentieth-century movement that demanded precision, compressed phrasing, and direct presentation of the image. Discovering the work of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, and others, she became an energetic organizer and promoter. Beginning in 1915 she edited a series of annual anthologies titled Some Imagist Poets, which brought together figures such as H.D., Aldington, and John Gould Fletcher, giving the movement coherence and a wider audience. Her sustained, practical support, arranging publications, securing readings, and explaining Imagist principles in essays and talks, helped carry the style into American literary consciousness.

Her leadership also generated friction. Ezra Pound, an early architect of Imagism, objected to her editorial direction and her influence, at one point deriding the enterprise as "Amygism". Despite the acrimony, Lowell's work ensured that Imagist writing reached readers far beyond London literary circles, and she broadened its scope to include a range of voices and subjects. The dispute with Pound became emblematic of the period's vigorous debates over innovation and authority.

Craft, Forms, and Themes
Lowell's poetry blends classical allusion with a modern, sensuous immediacy. She favored free verse and cultivated cadence, arguing that the ear, not inherited meter, should govern the line. She also experimented with what she called polyphonic prose, a flexible, musical form that borrows the velocity and paragraph shape of prose while using the sonic patterns of poetry. Her subjects ranged from the intimate to the public: garden paths, city streets, the textures of fabrics and flowers, the tempo of modern life, and the private intensities of love. East Asian art and verse, especially Japanese and Chinese aesthetics as understood through Western intermediaries of her time, informed her attentiveness to pattern, negative space, and concentration of detail; the title of her 1919 collection, Pictures of the Floating World, signals that affinity.

Notable Works and Critical Writing
Lowell sustained a rapid pace of publication. Men, Women and Ghosts (1916) and Can Grande's Castle (1918) display her range, the latter especially associated with her polyphonic prose experiments. Pictures of the Floating World (1919) further explores the lyric possibilities of sharp, visualized moments. In criticism, she published Six French Poets (1915) and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), volumes that reflect her dual identity as practitioner and advocate. A skilled literary biographer as well, she wrote John Keats (1925), a substantial study that combined research with an intuitive sympathy for the Romantic poet whose sensuous craft she admired. Her late collection What's O'Clock (1925) appeared shortly before her death and was recognized posthumously with the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

Personal Life and Collaborations
Lowell's home in Brookline functioned as a salon where manuscripts were drafted, revised, and discussed with trusted readers. Among the most significant presences in her life was Ada Dwyer Russell, a former actress who became Lowell's closest companion and frequent first reader. Russell's editorial help and emotional support were central to Lowell's productivity, and many of Lowell's love poems, such as pieces that dwell on domestic rooms filled with flowers, glimpses of a departing figure, or a shared, luminous quiet, have often been read as blossoms of that relationship. Lowell preferred privacy about intimate matters, and later gaps in her personal papers have complicated biographical study, but Russell's importance to her daily work and to the warmth and immediacy of many poems is widely acknowledged.

Lowell's professional friendships were equally influential. She worked closely with H.D., Aldington, and John Gould Fletcher to clarify and publicize Imagist aims; she corresponded with Harriet Monroe about publishing strategies and the reception of new verse. Even when disagreements flared, as with Pound, Lowell maintained an unwavering commitment to the principle that poetry advances through craft, candor, and experiment.

Public Role and Reputation
A formidable lecturer and a poised presence before audiences, Lowell traveled widely to read and to defend modern poetry in an era quick to mock it. Her confident advocacy challenged expectations about how a poet should speak and appear; she cultivated a distinctive public persona, from her commanding platform manner to the cigars she was known to smoke, symbols of a self-authored authority in a literary culture still dominated by men. Critics sometimes caricatured her extravagance or dismissed her as a wealthy patron rather than a creator. Nevertheless, the intricacy of her technique, especially in free verse, and the sensuous clarity of her images won a growing readership.

By the early 1920s she was both contested and indispensable: a poet of original gifts and a logistical engine behind the spread of modernist verse in the United States. Her persistent work as editor, anthologist, and critic helped secure publication venues for contemporaries and accustomed readers to new cadences.

Final Years, Death, and Legacy
Lowell continued to publish and to revise ambitiously in her final years, moving between her own poems and large-scale critical projects. She died in Brookline in 1925 at the age of fifty-one. The following year, her book What's O'Clock was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a posthumous recognition that affirmed the achievement readers had already felt in her work.

Amy Lowell's legacy rests on two intertwined pillars. First, she was a poet of vivid tactility and disciplined musical freedom, a writer who honed free verse into a vehicle for dramatic pressure, humor, and tenderness. Iconic pieces such as Patterns and other lyrics of the 1910s and 1920s show her capacity to conjure a scene in a few strokes while letting emotional undercurrents rise with compositional control. Second, she was a catalyst for her era: through the Some Imagist Poets anthologies, her essays and lectures, and her practical help to peers like H.D., Richard Aldington, and John Gould Fletcher, she brought modern poetry into American conversation. The quarrels with Ezra Pound, the alliances with Harriet Monroe and other editors, and the lifelong companionship of Ada Dwyer Russell are part of a life that fused art and organization.

In the decades since her death, scholars and poets have returned to Lowell for her technical intelligence, her defenses of free verse, and her portrayal of private life with dignified candor. The ongoing recovery of women's and LGBTQ histories has also brought new attention to how she shaped a literary vocation on her own terms. Standing at the intersection of Boston's nineteenth-century literary inheritance and the bracing innovations of the twentieth century, Amy Lowell remains a pivotal figure in American poetry, at once maker and mover of modernism.

Our collection contains 14 quotes who is written by Amy, under the main topics: Writing - Live in the Moment - Art - Book - Legacy & Remembrance.