At the time of her death in 1925, Amy Lowell was the most powerful woman in American poetry. She was a celebrity; her books sold out in pre-publication and crowds mobbed her in train stations. As a 5-foot tall, 200 pound, cigar-smoking lesbian, she cut quite a figure. Called the ‘hippopoetess,’ one of her most controversial poems depicted her musing while soaking in a bathtub.
The predecessor to performance, or slam poetry, Amy Lowell pushed the podium off the stage at every lecture hall. Friends stood behind the curtains banging on drums as sound effects. Her lover, Ada Dwyer Russell, a divorced actress, coached her for the stage. Lowell screamed and whispered as she read, stamping her feet to the rhythm. Audiences often didn’t know how to react and would sit in awed silence at the conclusion. Her trademark phrase was, ‘Well? – Clap or hiss, I don’t care which; but for Christ’s sake, do something!’ And audiences came equally to do both.
Since her death, however, the literary community has increasingly overlooked Amy Lowell. Critics believe that when she died her poems died with her, that they needed her flamboyant personality and her intensity to endure. Selected Poems contends that Lowell has much to offer modern audiences, as a women’s studies figure, a compelling study of gender roles, and an important precursor to modern poetry.
Her physical features matched her powerful, imperious, and robust poetry. Lowell was the patron saint of ‘New Poetry.’ Leaving behind Victorian conventions, Lowell, Robert Frost, and others began writing simple, imagistic poems. This movement, known as ‘imagism,’ became more popular than any poetic trend before it. Her poems detail the material surface of the world, especially flowers and other natural scenes. She believed that the glittering surface would reveal a deeper emotion and truth. Her poems are full of colors, especially purples and blues, and textures. A poem called ‘the Blue Scarf’ depicts the poet gazing at a scarf belonging to her lover and daydreaming about an encounter between the two in a garden the day before.
Selected Poems is the first comprehensive collection of Amy Lowell’s various poetic forms and styles. It includes two introductions by the editors, which capture her enigmatic personality. The first, by Melissa Bradshaw of DePaul University, is heavily biographical and contains little commentary on the more controversial parts of Lowell’s life and poetry, such as her startling and immodestly erotic lesbian love poems. Bradshaw ends her introduction by asserting that our current generation is ‘ready for’ Lowell and all the homosexual controversy she creates. Unfortunately she undermines that assertion by leaving out information about Lowell’s relationship with Russell, and how these poems were published and received in the early 1900’s.
The second introduction, by Adrienne Munich at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, delves more deeply into Lowell’s various poetic forms. Lowell mostly wrote in traditional forms, such as sonnets, in the early part of her career. The most interesting section of the collection was devoted to her study of Asian forms. Lowell spent several years molding stiff translations of Chinese poems into beautiful flowing language. Her ambition turned to experimentation, and the majority of the collection is devoted to two forms that she invented, ‘cadenced verse’ and ‘polyphonic prose.’ Both are heavily rhythmic, and give the poet much freedom. Polyphonic prose is real prose, except heavily descriptive, with great attention paid to the rhythm and rhyme within each line.
Both introductions fail to address one of the more bristling elements of Lowell’s career, the deep divisions between her and other poets of her time. Lowell and Ezra Pound, who began their careers as very good friends, ended life with a deep resentment of one another. Selected Poems includes ‘Astigmatism,’ which depicts Pound methodically slashing the heads off of flowers with his cane because ‘they were not roses.’ Lowell believed that good poetry should be accessible to all people, whereas Pound desired a more selective, intellectual audience.
Selected Poems includes her most famous works and her most controversial. One or two of Lowell’s poems are often included in anthologies, as a historical marker of the popularity of imagism. However, this collection proves that Lowell is a poet of the quality and caliber to warrant more attention. The great variety provided in these 122 pages show that Lowell was a versatile and accomplished writer. The collection sparkles and blazes as much as Lowell did during her life, proving that her poetry has indeed lived long after her dynamic life ended.
