Amy Lowell

Identity:

Amy Lowell was a poet and writer of essays and reviews. She was the daughter of the wealthy New England businessman Augustus Lowell and the musician and linguist Katherine Bigelow Lawrence. She remained unmarried but from 1912 was in a committed relationship with the actress Ada Dwyer Russell.

Life:

Disappointed in love, Lowell made a winter trip to Europe and Egypt in 1897-1898, when she may have met Whistler. Around this time she bought Blue and Silver: Dieppe y499 from him [#10935].

Lowell became a member of the executive committee of the Brookline Education Society and Chair of its Library Board. In October 1902, at the age of 28, she decided to follow a career in poetry. In 1910 four of her sonnets were published by the Atlantic Monthly. In 1912 she published her first book of poetry, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass. It received much criticism. She became friendly with Ezra Pound but fell out over the imagist movement for which she became spokesperson. Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) and Six French Poets (1915) brought her critical success. Further publications include Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), Pictures of a Floating World (1919) and a biography, John Keats (1925).

Bibliography:

The Annual Register, 1925, p. 135; Dinneen, Marcia B., Amy Lowell's Life and Career, American National Biography, New York, 1999, www.english.uiuc.edu, accessed 4 May 2004.