Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874, in
Brookline, Massachusetts, the daughter of
Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member of the
Brahmin Lowell family, her siblings included the astronomer
Percival Lowell, the educator and legal scholar
Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and
Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren of
John Lowell and, on their mother's side, the grandchildren of
Abbott Lawrence. School was a source of considerable despair for the young Amy Lowell. She considered herself to be developing "masculine" and "ugly" features and she was a social outcast. She had a reputation among her classmates for being outspoken and opinionated. At fifteen she wanted to be a photographer, poet, and coach racer. Lowell never attended college because her family did not consider it proper for a woman to do so. She compensated for this lack with avid reading and near-obsessive
book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 (aged 28) after being inspired by a performance of
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. Lowell was a
lesbian, and in 1912 she met the actress
Ada Dwyer Russell, who would become her lover. Russell is the subject of many of Lowell's more erotic works, most notably the love poems contained in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection of
Pictures of the Floating World. 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. Pound considered Lowell's embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hijacking of the movement. Lowell has been linked romantically to writer
Mercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence of any contact between them is a brief correspondence about a planned memorial for Duse. Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a
pince-nez. '' cover from March 2, 1925, featuring Lowell Lowell publicly smoked cigars, as newspapers of the day frequently mentioned. in Cambridge, Massachusetts Lowell died of a
cerebral hemorrhage in 1925, at the age of 51, and is buried at
Mount Auburn Cemetery. 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 Untermeyer said was the poem of hers he liked best. Her first published work appeared in 1910 in
Atlantic Monthly. The first published collection of her poetry,
A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later, in 1912. An additional group of uncollected poems was added to the volume
The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, published in 1955 with an introduction by Untermeyer, who considered himself her friend. Though she sometimes wrote
sonnets, Lowell was an early adherent to the "
free verse" method of poetry and one of the major champions of this method. She defined it in her preface to "Sword Blades and Poppy Seed" in the
North American 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 must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader. Or, to put it another way, unrhymed
cadence is "built upon 'organic rhythm,' or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. Free verse within its own law of
cadence has no absolute rules; it would not be 'free' if it had." Untermeyer writes that "She was not only a disturber but an awakener." In many poems, Lowell dispenses with line breaks, so that the work looks like prose on the page. This technique she labeled "polyphonic prose". Throughout her working life, Lowell was a promoter of both contemporary and historical poets. Her book
Fir-Flower Tablets was a poetical re-working of literal translations of the works of ancient Chinese poets, notably
Li Tai-po (701–762). Her writing also included critical works on French literature. At the time of her death, she was attempting to complete her two-volume biography of
John Keats (work on 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 stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius." Lowell published not only her own work, but also that of other writers. According to Untermeyer, she "captured" the Imagist movement from
Ezra Pound. Pound threatened to sue her for bringing out her three-volume series
Some Imagist Poets, and thereafter derisively called the American Imagists the "Amygist" movement. Pound criticized her as not an imagist, but merely a rich woman who was able to financially assist the publication of imagist poetry. She said that Imagism was weak before she took it up, whereas others said it became weak after Pound's "exile" towards
Vorticism.
D.H. Lawrence dedicated his 1918 book New Poems "To Amy Lowell". Lowell wrote at least two poems about libraries—The "Boston Athenaeum" and "The Congressional Library"—during her career. A discussion of libraries also appears in her essay "Poetry, Imagination, and Education". ==Relationship with Ada Dwyer Russell==