Amy Lowell by Marcia Dinneen Essay

Amy Lowells Life and locomote Marcia B. Dinneen (http//www. english. illinois. edu/maps/poets/g_l/amylowell/life. htm) Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachu dance bandts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lawrence. Both sides of the family were New England aristocrats, wealthy and bad peniss of society. Augustus Lowell was a businessman, civil leader, and horticulturalist, Katherine Lowell an accomplished musician and linguist. Although considered as almost disreputable, poets were voice of the Lowell family, including James Russell Lowell, a first cousin, and later Robert Lowell.As the daughter of a wealthy family, Lowell was first educated at the family home, Sevenels ( lay downd by her gravel as a reference to the seven Lowells living there), by an English governess who go away her with a lifelong inability to spell. Her first meter, Chacago, written at season nine, is testament to this problem. In the fall of 1883 Lowell began attending a series of backstage trails in Brookline and Boston. At school she was the t computer error of the faculty (Gould, p. 32). Even at Mrs.Cabots school, founded by a Lowell cousin to educate her own children and the children of friends and relations, Lowell was all in all indifferent to classroom decorum. Noisy, opinionated, and spoilight-emitting diode, she terrorized the opposite students and spoke back to her teachers (Heymann, p. 164).During school vacations Lowell travelled with her family. She went to Europe and to New Mexico and California. On the latter set off she kept a travel journal. Lowell enjoyed writing, and two stories she wrote during this time were printed in Dream Drops or, Stories from Fairyland (1887), by a Dreamer. The volume was published privately by her mother, who besides contri neverthelessed material, and the continue were donated to the Perkins Institute for the Blind. Lowells schooling included the usual classes in English, history, French, literature, and a little Italian. As Lowell later noned, My family did not consider that it was necessary for girls to settle any Greek or Latin (Damon, p. 87). She would also describe her schematic education as not amounting to a hill of beans (Benvenuto, p. 6). School cease in 1891, and Lowell made her de that. Described as the most popular debutante of the season, she went to sixty dinners given in her honor.Her popularity was attributed to her skills in dancing and in the guile of conversation, but her debut did not produce the expected marriage proposal. Although Lowell had destroyed formal schooling, she continued to educate herself. Unfortunately, higher education was not an option for Lowell women. She put herself through a rigorous reading program, using her fathers 7,000-volume library and the resources of the Boston Athenaeum (her great-grandfather was one of the founders). Later Lowell would successfully speak out against the proposed relocation of the Athenaeum this would also become the payoff of a verse form.Lowells love of makes themselves began with her first Rollo have got, Rollo Learning to Read, which her mother gave her when she was six. This render marked the beginning of an enthusiasm for book collecting that would terminal end-to-end her life. In 1891 she made her first major purchase of a set of the complete works of Sir Walter Scott with property she had received as a Christmas gift. It was, however, her army of Keatsiana, including a rare first edition of Lamia inscribed to F. B. from J. K. (Fanny Brawne from keister Keats), that put her in the forefront of international book collectors.Following her debut, Lowell led the life of a prominent socialite, visiting, going to parties and the theater, and traveling. Her mother, who had been an invalid for years, died in 1895. A disappointment in love prompted a winter trip to Egypt in 1897-1898. Lowell had accepted the proposal of a Bostonian whom she loved, but forrader the engagement was formally announced he became entangled elsewhere (Damon, p. 120). The family could do nothing to shelter her except guard tenaciously the name of the errant suitor (Gould, p. 65). The trip was also for health reasons.Doctors felt Lowells obesity could be vulcanised by the Egyptian heat and a diet of nothing but tomatoes and asparagus. The regimen almost killed her and resulted in a prolonged nervous collapse. In 1900 Lowells father died, and she bought Sevenels. She also bought a summer home in Dublin, New Hampshire, that she named Broomley Lacey. The area was home to the MacDowell Artists Colony as well as to other notable painters and sculptors. In Brookline Lowell assumed her fathers civic responsibilities. Early in 1902 she spoke against the reappointment of the elderly superintendent of the Brookline public school system.She was the first woman in the Lowell family to make a speech in public (Gould, p. 77). Initially booed, Lowell continued to speak with her usual forth rightness and, at the end, won applause as well as her point. Lowell became a member of the executive committee of the Brookline Education Society and chair of its Library Board. In October 1902 Lowell became a poet. Her fill in verse had been growing beyond her childhood enthusiasm, fueled by her reading Leigh Hunts Imagination and conjuring trick or, Selections from the English Poets,which she had found near the ceiling in her fathers library.The volume was a revelation to her, opening a door that ability otherwise have remained shut, Lowell remarked (Gould, p. 51). She had become enamored of poetry and the poets Hunt discussed, curiously Keats. After she saw Eleanora Duse perform one October night she wrote her first bounteous meter, Eleanora Duse. Although some critics say that she was being too hard on herself, Lowell exposit the 71-line poem as having every cliche and every technical error which a poem can have. Yet she also said, It loosed a dash in my brain and I found out where my true number lay (Damon, p. 148).At age twenty-eight she had elateed her calling to be a poet. In 1910 four of Lowells sonnets were accepted for publication by the Atlantic Monthly. A Fixed Idea, published first, appeared in August of that year. By 1912 she had published her first book of poetry, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass the appellation came from Percy Bysshe Shelleys Adonais, his elegy for Keats. It was not well received by either the public or the critics. Louis Untermeyer wrote that the book to be brief, in spite of its exanimate classicism, can never institutionalize ones anger. But, to be briefer still, it cannot rouse one at all (Damon, p. 92). Yet 1912 was also the year that Lowell met actress adenosine deaminase Dwyer Russell. The friendship between the two women has been described as platonic by some, as lesbian by others it was, in fact, a Boston marriage. They lived in concert and were committed to each other until Lowells death. Russell was Low ells companion, providing love and activated support, as well as the practical skill of organizing Lowells crabbed life. Biographer Richard Benvenuto observed that Lowells great creative output between 1914 and 1925 would not have been possible without her friends steadying, supporting presence (p. 0). The following(a) year Lowell discovered some poems in song by Hilda Doolittle, sign(a) H. D. Imagiste. Lowell felt an identification with the style of H. D. s poetry and refractory to discover more about it. Armed with a letter of introduction from Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, Lowell traveled to capital of the United Kingdom to meet Ezra beat, head of the imagist movement. In London Lowell not only learned about imagism and free verse from log, but she also met many poets, several of whom became lifelong friends.Over the years Lowell would get up many literary friendships that resulted in an enormous volume of literary correspondence, requiring Lowell to employ two full-tim e secretaries. Lowell not only supported and encouraged other poets with her writing, such as her favorable review of Robert Frosts northwestward of Boston in the New Republic (20 Feb. 1915), but also with money and gifts. Lowells poems began to appear in increasing numbers in journals, and she was change state a prolific writer of essays and reviews. Pound had requested the inclusion of her poem In a Garden in his anthology Des Imagistes(1914).Later Lowell and Pound would have a falling out over the direction of the imagist movement, and Pound would call the movement, as adapted by Lowell, Amygism. Lowell became the spokesperson of imagism, leading the scramble for the renewal of poetry in her homeland (Francis, p. 510), and her efforts were tireless. She traveled throughout the country, interchange the new poetry. Her own volume Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), written in free verse and polyphonic prose, a Lowell invention, brought her an instantaneous phenomenal parachut e to fame (Gould, p. 139).Lowells first book of criticism, Six French Poets (1915), based on a series of her lectures, was also well received. Lowell was publishing a book a year, alternating between volumes of short verse and longer poems. Men, Women and Ghosts (1916) was passing regarded and contained Patterns one of her most famous poems. In it an eighteenth-century woman, walking in her garden, contemplates a future that has suddenly become empty because of the loss of her fiance in battle she mourns the fact that the Patterns of her role required her to remain chaste before marriage.The next year she published another critical volume, Tendencies in novel American Poetry, which included essays on six contemporary poets Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, H. D. , and privy Gould Fletcher. Lowell also published anthologies of imagist poets in 1915, 1916, and 1917. Her next volume of poetry, Can Grandes Castle (1918), included four long poem s the title was taken from the name of the refuge where Dante, the Florentine exile, wrote portions of his Divine Comedy.Inspired by her lifelong interest in the Orient, Pictures of a Floating World (1919) is a translation of the Japanese word ukiyo-e, a term commonly associated with a form of eighteenth-century Japanese painting. It includes 174 short, free verse lyrics, considered by some as overtly erotic. For example, A Decade and The Weathercock Points South are described as a exultation of lesbian devotion. Legends (1921) contains eleven longer poems, and Fir-Flower Tablets (1921) is a collection of poems based on translations of ancient Chinese verse.Since Lowell did not read Chinese, she was dependent on English translations by Florence Wheelock Ayscough, which Lowell then turned back into poetry. A Critical emblem (1922) is a long, humorous poem, evaluating the state of contemporary poetry. Originally published anonymously, the poem pokes fun at fellow poets and at Lowell herself in lines of rhymed couplets. The poem was modeled on James Russell Lowells A Fable for Critics (1848). Her last publication was the momentous biography , John Keats (1925).In 1921 Lowell had given an speak to at Yale honoring Keats on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth. The lecture affect her to write the book, which minutely examines Keatss life and corrects some long-standing misconceptions about him. Lowell was also the first biographer to see Fanny Brawne in a favorable light. The book was well received in the United States but not in Britain, where she was accused of writing a psychological thriller rather than a literary biography. Lowell was angry and heartbroken but in typical fashion determined to confront the critics on their own turf.