Amy Lowell: Contribution as American Poetess

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      Miss Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. James Russell Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather, and she numbers among her relatives her mother’s father, Abbott Lawrence, minister to England, and a brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard. In her education general reading and wide travel were the most important factors. In 1902, at the age of twenty-eight, she decided to devote herself to poetry, and for the next eight years she studied and wrote without attempting publication. Her first verse was printed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1910, and her first volume, “A Dome of Many-Colored Glass,” was published in 1912. Her further volumes have been “Sword Blades and Poppy Seed” (1914), “Six French Poets” (1915), “Men, Women and Ghosts” (1916), “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry” (1917), and “Can Grande’s Castle” (1919)—in all, four volumes of verse and two of prose criticism. She has been a conspicuous personality among contemporary poets in France, England, and America, and though she has not been lacking in self-assertiveness she has been without question chiefly interested in the progress of contemporary poetry and finely generous in both theory and practice in the support of her fellow-poets.

Amy Lowell

      As one of her most recent critics has pointed out, she has been notable and notably American in her zest for argument and in her love of experiment—“a female Roosevelt among the Parnassians.” She has championed the cause of modern poetry and has fought the conventions of Victorian verse wherever she has encountered them, and in her liking for experiment and her absorption in technique she has taken up the cudgels successively for free verse, for the tenets of Imagism, and for polyphonic prose. She has been most closely identified with the activities of the Imagist poets—three Englishmen, two Anglicized Americans, and herself—and it is therefore well to summarize the six objects to which they committed themselves: (1) to use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, (2) to create new rhythms as the expression of new moods, (3) to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject (within the limits of good taste), (4) to present an image (hence the name “Imagist”), (5) to produce poetry that is hard and clear, (6) to insist on concentration as the essence of poetry. A stanza from “Before the Altar,” the opening poem in her first book, serves to illustrate her technique as an Imagist:

 His sole condition

 Love and poverty.

 And while the moon

 Swings slow across the sky,

 Athwart a waving pine tree,

 And soon

 Tips all the needles there

 With silver sparkles, bitterly

 He gazes, while his soul

 Grows hard with thinking of the poorness of his dole.

      The fourth section of “Spring Day,” the poem in “Men, Women and Ghosts” which begins with the much-discussed “Bath,” is an example of her “polyphonic prose”:

      In her essay on John Gould Fletcher, in “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,” Miss Lowell has defined the æsthetic intent of this poetic form: “ ‘Polyphonic’ means—many-voiced—and the form is so-called because it makes use of all the ‘voices’ of poetry, namely: metre, vers libre, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and return. It employs every form of rhythm, even prose rhythm at times, but usually holds no particular one for long. … The rhymes may come at the ends of the cadences, or may appear in close juxtaposition to each other, or may be only distantly related.” These two forms, with the aid of the two formulas, may be tested at leisure from an abundance of passages; they correspond with their recipes, are distinct from each other, and have certain distinctive beauties. But a further experiment—the attempt to make the cadences of free verse harmonize with the movements of natural objects—is by no means so successful. “If the reader will turn,” says Miss Lowell, in the preface to “Men, Women and Ghosts,” “to the poem ‘A Roxbury Garden,’ he will find in the first two sections an attempt to give the circular movement of a hoop bowling along the ground, and the up-and-down, elliptical curve of a flying shuttlecock.” The following, presumably, is a segment of the circular movement:

 “I will beat you Minna,” cries Stella,

 Hitting her hoop smartly with her stick.

 “Stella, Stella, we are winning,” calls Minna,

 As her hoop curves round a bed of clove-pinks.

      It is an example, in fact, of the fruitlessness of dwelling on a matter of artistic form till it becomes more important than the artistic content. Miss Lowell admits in this connection that there flashed into her mind “the idea of using the movement of poetry.” The student, therefore, should not regard the resultant verses as anything more than experiments in technique, and at the same time he should speculate as to whether a vital artistic form can ever be imposed upon a subject instead of springing spontaneously from it.

      Yet, although Miss Lowell’s reputation rests mainly on her experiments in novel and striking poetic forms, most of her work has been written in conformity with classic traditions. The opening volume is all in common rhythms, and so is most of the second, and quite half of the third. The last alone is devoted to a new form; “Can Grande’s Castle” contains four long poems in polyphonic prose. The tendency is clearly in the direction of the innovations, but thus far the balance is about even between the new and the old.

      As to subject matter, Miss Lowell’s thesis is Poe’s: that poetry should not teach either facts or morals, but should be dedicated to beauty; it is a stained-glass window, a colored transparency. And the poet is a nonsocial being who spurns life’s human friendships to profess Life’s loneliness of dreaming ecstacy.

      Like Poe she limits herself to the production of lyrics and tales and resorts not infrequently to grotesques and arabesques. Unlike Poe her resort to horror leads her to the composition of sex infidelities which are sometimes boring, sometimes foul, and rarely interesting. On this point (rule three for the Imagists) Miss Lowell falters awkwardly. “ ‘How can the choice of subject be absolutely unrestricted?’—horrified critics have asked. The only reply to such a question is that one had supposed one were speaking to people of common sense and intelligence.” The bounds of taste are assumed; yet these, she hastens to state, differ for different judges, and she illustrates her contention by the extreme extensiveness of her own. Finally, and again like Poe, Miss Lowell is to a high degree bookishly literary in her choice and treatment of subjects.

      After all, for the attentive reader of contemporary poetry Miss Lowell’s most distinguished service has been in her two books of criticism. In the concourse of present-day poets she is a kind of drum major. One cannot see the procession without seeing her or admiring the skill with which she swings and tosses the baton. But when the parade is past, one can easily forget her until the trumpets blare again. She leads the way effectively, and one is glad to have her do it—glad that there are those who enjoy being excellent drum majors. Then one pays farewell to her in the words with which she salutes Ezra Pound in her verses headed “Astigmatism”: "Peace be with you, [Sister]. You have chosen your part."