■Lowell, Amy1874╨1925poet and criticBorn on February 9, 1874, in Brookline, Massachusetts, Amy Lowell came from a long-prominent Massachusetts family. She was the sister of Abbott Lawrence Lowell, later president of Harvard, and of astronomer Percival Lowell. She was educated in private schools and by her mother, and until she was twenty-eight she did little but alternately live at home, where she enjoyed the life of a Boston socialite of means and breeding, and travel abroad. About 1902╤in consequence, she later wrote, of seeing Eleonora Duse during the latter╒s Boston season╤she decided to devote her energies to poetry. It was eight years before her first piece, a conventional but not undistinguished sonnet, was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and two more before her first volume, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared. In 1912 she discovered Harriet Monroe╒s Poetry magazine, and on a visit to England in 1913 she met Ezra Pound and discovered his circle, the Imagists. He included a poem of hers in his anthology Des Imagistes, 1914, and in that year she published her second book, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, which included her first experimental work with free verse and ╥polyphonic prose.╙ She edited the three numbers of Some Imagist Poets, 1915╨1917, and subsequent volumes of her own work included Men, Women, and Ghosts, which contained her well known ╥Patterns,╙ 1916, Can Grande╒s Castle, with ╥The Bronze Horses,╙ 1918, Pictures of the Floating World, 1919, Fir-Flower Tablets, a collection of translations from the Chinese, with Florence Ayscough, 1921, Legends, 1921, and posthumously, What╒s o╒Clock, including ╥Lilacs,╙ 1925, East Wind, 1926, and Ballads for Sale, 1927. Her critical work included Six French Poets, 1915, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, 1917, and a two-volume biography of John Keats, undertaken after delivering at Yale an address commemorating the centennial of his death and published in 1925. Amy Lowell became the leading exponent of the modernist movement in poetry in the United States and succeeded Ezra Pound as the guiding spirit of Imagism. She was a brilliant and popular conversationalist and lecturer. Unconventional in her life as in her poetry, she enjoyed a fame that edged into notoriety. Her eminence among the modern poets of the day derived perhaps less from the quality of her own verse than from her courageous and highly pragmatic leadership. Her bluff, witty, cigar-smoking, and corpulent presence went far to disarm the opposition before it could mount an offense. In 1922 she published A Critical Fable, a playful verse treatment of several contemporary poets patterned on the Fable for Critics of her collateral ancestor, James Russell Lowell. She died suddenly on May 12, 1925, in Brookline, Massachusetts. ªstyl ` . ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ ' !I ∞ !I ⁿ !I $ !I A !I O 5¬ P !I g !I ▐ u !I x !I ~ !I !I ! !I Y !I t !I Θ !I √ !I 8 !I N !I ü !I ö !I ╢ !I ╘ !I ▄ !I ε !I = !I D !I ^ !I l !I ê !I æ !I ¥ !I ¡ !I ╨ !I α !I Φ !I !I ░ 5¬ ▒ !I
