Lowell / Classics Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell Illustrated

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80170-253-9
Verlag: Delphi Publishing Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 1136 Seiten

The Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1926, Amy Lowell was a leading member of the Imagist school. During a career that spanned only a dozen years, she published over 650 poems, experimenting with new forms and modernist techniques. She sought to inspire American readers to explore contemporary trends in poetry, bringing the Imagism of Ezra Pound and H. D. to greater attention. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature's finest poets, with superior formatting. This volume presents Lowell's complete poetical works, with related illustrations and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)

* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Lowell's life and works
* An original and detailed introduction to Lowell's life and poetry by Gill Rossini
* The complete poetry, digitsed here for the first time in publishing history
* Images of how the poetry books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the poems
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry
* Easily locate the poems you want to read
* Lowell's seminal essay for the 'Some Imagist Poets' collection
* Ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres

CONTENTS:

The Life and Poetry of Amy Lowell
Introduction to Amy Lowell (2025) by Gill Rossini
A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912)
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914)
Men, Women and Ghosts (1916)
Can Grande's Castle (1919)
Pictures of the Floating World (1919)
Legends (1921)
Fir-Flower Tablets (1921)
A Critical Fable (1922)
What's O'Clock (1925)
East Wind (1926)
Ballads for Sale (1927)
Uncollected Poems

The Poems
List of Poems in Chronological Order
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

The Essay
Preface to 'Some Imagist Poets' (1915)
The Delphi Classics Catalogue

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lowell, Amy

Classics, Delphi

Leseproben

Amy Lowell: A Short Biography

AMY LOWELL WAS born on 9 February 1874, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member of the Brahmin (old Bostonian elite) Lowell family, her siblings included the astronomer Percival Lowell, the educator and legal scholar Abbott Lawrence Lowell and President of Harvard University and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for pre-natal care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, on their mother’s side, the grandchildren of Abbott Lawrence, thus descended from the crème de la crème of American society; their ancestors were among the founders of the American nation. Lowell was also distantly related to the noted American Romantic poet, James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), a connection that has been credited with giving Lowell her initial interest in poetry.

Lowell came from a wealthy family, although this did not aid her in her education — in fact it was a hindrance; as befitted her status as a Bostonian ‘aristocratic’ female, she began her education at home with a governess and then attended a number of different schools in Boston and Brooklyn. These were not happy years for her. Possessing no conventional beauty, she felt ugly and too masculine in her features, resorting to acting the class ‘clown’ to gain attention from her peers. This had little effect, as they considered her to be loud and opinionated. Nor did she have a conventional society marriage in mind at that time; by her mid-teens she was considering a career as a photographer, coach racer — or a poet. It would be another fifteen years at least before that poetic ambition was consolidated.

Due to her social status, her family forbade her to attend college, as it would not befit her expected role as a future Boston society wife. However, instead of obliging by entering the ‘marriage market’, she busied herself with obsessive reading and book collecting and, although essentially self educated, was even able to lecture on literary topics in Boston. Her position did allow her to travel widely and it was while she was in Europe in 1902 that she was so inspired by a performance by actor Eleonora Duse, that she wrote some of her first poetry. Thus, her career as a poet did not flourish until she was well into her thirties and she became not just a committed scholar of her art, but an innovator too. It should be noted that Lowell never turned her back on her family’s status, fortune or the sense of personal authority being born into such a dynasty bestowed. Instead, she used her position to live very comfortably, in a property in the grounds of the family estate; she travelled in luxury motor cars; she employed secretaries and never went on speaking or lecturing tours without a retinue of staff to look after her, as she stayed in exclusive hotels. In fact, she described herself as the ‘Last of the Barons’, completely at ease with the natural authority her position gave her. Having said that, she used her position and money to feed her great passion — bringing poetry into everyday life so that everyone could engage with it. To this end and once established in her own right, her share of the family fortune was used to support new poets such as Carl Sandberg publish volumes of work. She was a showy and compelling speaker and T. S. Eliot summed her up as ‘the demon saleswoman’ (critics disagree as to whether Eliot was being cutting or flattering with this remark). With newcomers to the poetry scene, she was an attentive mentor, offering critique, making introductions to editors and writing articles about them to draw attention to their work. Despite this generosity and directing her family’s influence and social power into her poetry mission, she was despised by some modernist poets for having a fortune in the first place, something which was after all a mere accident of birth — but then they asked, why did she not walk away from all that comfort and money and endure life in its raw state? The answer has to be that the thought never occurred to her and that she enjoyed its power and what she could achieve with it. If she had not had the funds to visit Ezra Pound in England, she may never have become a leading light in the Imagist movement.

In 1909 Lowell met the actress Ada Dwyer Russell, who after five years of friendship, accompanied by Lowell’s ardent courtship, would become her lover and long term partner. Russell (her married name) is widely described as Lowell’s muse, ‘the lady of the moon’ and the subject of many of her more erotic works, most notably the love poems contained in ‘Two Speak Together’, a subsection of Pictures of the Floating World. Russell was eleven years older than Lowell and more than able to withstand the pressures of Lowell’s formidable and driven personality. The two women travelled to England together for the eventful meeting with Ezra Pound, who had been a major influence, though later he became a scathing critic of her work; Russell was a considerable support to Lowell in her stressful dealings with Pound, whom even the ebullient Lowell found overbearing. In turn, Pound considered Lowell’s embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hijacking of the movement.

Over the years, Lowell willingly supported and indeed loved Russell’s daughter (from her short lived marriage) and ‘their’ grandchildren, supporting them as her own family; their household was completed with numerous boisterous dogs, Lowell’s ‘babies’, who were the bane of many a visitor to the Lowell household. The couple lived together from 1914 to 1925, their partnership ending only with Lowell’s death. Sadly, the couple had an agreement that many papers, including letters relating to their partnership would be destroyed and Russell, as her partner’s executrix, honoured that. As a result, many details of their life together have been lost. As a mark of Lowell’s love and respect she wanted to dedicate her books openly to her lover, but Russell refused except for one time in a non-poetry book in which Lowell wrote, ‘To A. D. R. This and all my books. A.L.’ Examples of these love poems to Russell include Taxi, Absence, In a Garden, Madonna of the Evening Flowers, Opal and Aubade. Lowell admitted to John Livingston Lowes that Russell was the subject of her series of romantic poems titled ‘Two Speak Together’. These have since been praised as some of the most genuinely sensual and evocative lesbian love poems ever written.

Lowell was later criticised for not aligning herself, as a lesbian living in a devoted same sex ‘marriage’, with the feminists of her day. Others saw her essentially private (but not secret) partnership with Russell as a sign that it was a platonic friendship, nothing more, but a post-1945 re-evaluation of her love poems makes nonsense of this idea. It seems that in some quarters, no matter what Lowell did or did not do, she was doomed to fail in the eyes of some.

Also, 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, who died the year before Lowell.

As Lowell’s reputation as a poet evolved, her appearance and life came under public scrutiny. As at school, she was still considered rather an oddity, being a short, very overweight (possibly from a medical condition) woman that smoked cigars in public, at the time a socially inappropriate thing to do. A ‘single’ (in a heteronormative sense) woman with private means, branded a ‘plain jane’ in a society that valued feminine decorousness, Lowell was the perfect target to be lampooned; yet despite her public hubris, she had a very poor body image due to her weight and avoided looking in mirrors if at all possible. Whilst she never went so far as to wear male clothing such as trousers, she wore severely cut garments that were as little feminised as possible — another target for the popular press. There can be no doubt that cruel jibes such as that of Witter Byner, who dubbed Lowell the ‘hippopoetess’ would have stung, even if she refused to let it show.

Unfortunately, Lowell’s life was cut short at the age of 51 by a cerebral haemorrhage (described by Reuters as a ‘stroke of paralysis’) in 1925; she was buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, alongside other members of her family. According to the Westminster Gazette, Lowell had been planning a visit to England that year to undertake a lecturing tour, but had had to cancel some weeks before due to ill health, in the form of troublesome hernias which saw her confined to bed. (14 May 1925) She was also exhausted, her 1,100 page, two volume biography of Keats having taken up all her time and energy in the creation and writing it nearly ruined her eyesight.

The Scotsman published a genuinely admiring obituary on 14 May 1925, which included:

‘Miss Lowell [had] an urgent, singularly candid and provoking personality. As translator, critic, lecturer, propagandist, poet, she gave evidence of quite extraordinary versatility….She wrote pugnacious prefaces to her own verse, in which she stood out as the relentless champion of vers libre. She was the chief exponent of the principles which led to the formation of what was called the Imagist School…she practised what she preached with more art than any others.’

In just over a decade, Lowell had proved her critics (of whom the most vocal was Ezra Pound) wrong and become a respected and innovative poet....