Amy Lowell
1874-1925
Writing before and at the very beginning of the modernist movement, Lowell is best known as an imagist poet as well as a prominent book collector whose celebrated personal library included one of the largest private collections of books by one of her favorite poets, John Keats. Ezra Pound famously threatened to sue her for using her inherited wealth to publish imagist poetry and afterwards derisively referred to American imagists as “Amygists.”
Major works
- A Dome of Many Colored Glass (1912)
- Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914)
- Six French Poets (1915)
- Men, Women, and Poets (1916)
- Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917)
- This is a nonfiction book about modernist poetry, a great resource in research about modernism as well as a representation of Lowell’s work.
Known associates
- Richard Aldington
- H.D.
- F.S. Flint
- John Gould Fletcher
- Ford Madox Ford
- Ezra Pound
- Ada Dwyer Russell (secretary and companion)
Further reading
- Amy Lowell, a Critical Appreciation (Winifred Bryher, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1918)
- Written during her life by a contemporary figure, this book offers great literary criticism and appreciations of Lowell’s body of work. It is available online through the HathiTrust digital library.
- Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and the Imagist Movement (Jean Gould; Dodd, Mead; 1975).
- Available from the Hatcher Graduate Library, this situates Lowell as a figure in the Imagist movement furthered by the work of such poets as Ezra Pound and H.D.
Modernista Research Guide 