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Amy Lowell

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Lowell, Amy (Lawrence)

(1874–1925) poet; born in Brookline, Mass. (sister of Percival and Abbott Lawrence Lowell). She was educated privately, traveled widely, and settled in her childhood home. She suffered nervous breakdowns, but from 1902 on, found stability in writing literary criticism, "polyphonic prose," and, most importantly, Imagist and free verse poetry, as in Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914). In the last decade of her life, she was one of the most prominent and outspoken figures in American arts.
The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.
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WHEN I FIRST discovered the poetry of Amy Lowell, I was so taken with a group of her erotic poems that I suggested to my writer friend Judith that she do a one-woman show as Lowell reading her work.
The so-called polyphonic prose of Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher was an attempt to erase the boundaries between verse and prose.
We ought to start 'em." Imagism was new in 1913 when Pound started it, but a year later, when his anthology Des Imagistes was published, he was ready to declare that "'Imagism' is a catch word" and to turn the movement over to Amy Lowell, though with some lingering regret: "I had one brilliant inspiration.
He has also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in addition to two Pushcart Prizes the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship and Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Similarly, Amy Lowell's poetry from Dreams in War Time in movement "II" includes the line, "My own face lay like a white pebble, waiting." The text is perfectly nightmare-like when suspended by the slow tempo marking of quarter note = 44.
Associating with Pound and Amy Lowell, and greatly influenced by the Orient, he was for a while an imagist and a writer of polyphonic prose.
Other books published this year included The Innocents and The Job: An American Novel by Sinclair Lewis, both novels; Jerry of the Islands, a posthumous novel by Jack London, who died in 1916; Tendencies in Modern American Poetry by Amy Lowell; Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley, a novel; Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, a posthumous novel by David Graham Phillips, considered his best work; Merlin by Edwin Arlington Robinson, the first volume of a poetic trilogy dealing with the Arthurian legends that concluded with Lancelot (1920) and Tristram (1927); and King Coal by Upton Sinclair, a novel about coal mining in Colorado.
The male writers' 'attempt to dissociate desire from any form of identification' created the central split between many women writers such as H.D., Woolf, and Amy Lowell and their male contemporaries.
Gregory wrote biographies of Amy Lowell (1958) and James McNeill Whistler (1959).
Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw, eds., Amy Lowell: American Modern.
the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship for 2000/2001.
Just a partial list of possibilities, to remind you: Amy Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, May Swenson.
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