Amy Lowell by Marcia Dinneen Essay Example for Free

Amy Lowell by Marcia Dinneen EssayAmy Lowells Life and Career Marcia B. Dinneen (http//www. english. illinois. edu/maps/poets/g_l/amylowell/life. htm) Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lawrence. Both sides of the family were unsanded England aristocrats, wealthy and prominent members of society. Augustus Lowell was a businessman, civic leader, and horticulturalist, Katherine Lowell an accomplished musician and linguist. Although considered as nearly disreputable, poets were part of the Lowell family, including jam Russell Lowell, a offset cousin, and later Robert Lowell. As the daughter of a wealthy family, Lowell was first educated at the family dental plate, Sevenels (named by her father as a reference to the seven Lowells living there), by an English governess who left over(p) her with a life desire inability to spell. Her first poem, Chacago, written at age nine, is testament to this problem. In the s ettle d feature of 1883 Lowell began attending a series of private instills in Brookline and Boston. At school she was the t illusion of the faculty (Gould, p. 32). flat at Mrs.Cabots school, founded by a Lowell cousin to educate her own children and the children of friends and relations, Lowell was totally indifferent to classroom decorum. Noisy, opinionated, and spoi conduct, she terrorized the other students and spoke back to her teachers (Heymann, p. 164).During school vacations Lowell traveled with her family. She went to Europe and to New Mexico and California. On the latter trip 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 account mass was published privately by her mother, who also contributed material, and the proceeds were donated to the Perkins Institute for the Blind. Lowells schooling included the usual classes in English, history, Fren ch, literature, and a little Italian. As Lowell later noted, My family did not consider that it was necessary for girls to learn either Greek or Latin (Damon, p. 87). She would also describe her formal education as not amounting to a cumulation of beans (Benvenuto, p. 6). School ended in 1891, and Lowell made her debut. Described as the most popular debutante of the season, she went to cardinal dinners given in her honor.Her popularity was attributed to her aptitudes in dancing and in the art of conversation, but her debut did not bewilder the expected marriage proposal. Although Lowell had finished formal schooling, she go along to educate herself. Unfortunately, higher education was not an resource 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 unmatchable of the founders). Later Lowell would successfully speak out against the proposed relocati on of the Athenaeum this would also become the subject of a poem.Lowells screw of books themselves began with her first Rollo book, Rollo Learning to Read, which her mother gave her when she was six. This gift marked the beginning of an enthusiasm for book store that would last throughout her life. In 1891 she made her first major purchase of a set of the boundinated works of Sir Walter Scott with m atomic number 53y she had received as a Christmas gift. It was, however, her collection of Keatsiana, including a rare first magnetic variation of Lamia inscribed to F. B. from J. K. (Fanny Brawne from stool 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 who m she loved, but before the interlock was formally announced he became entangled elsewhere (Damon, p. 120). The family could do nothing to protect her except reserve tenaciously the name of the errant suitor (Gould, p. 65). The trip was also for health reasons.Doctors snarl Lowells obesity could be cured 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 leading light 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, Low ell continued to speak with her usual forthrightness 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 pursuance in poetry had been growing beyond her childhood enthusiasm, fueled by her reading Leigh Hunts Imagination and ideate 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 might otherwise have remained shut, Lowell remarked (Gould, p. 51). She had become enamored of poetry and the poets Hunt discussed, particularly Keats. after(prenominal) she saw Eleanora Duse perform one October night she wrote her first adult poem, Eleanora Duse. Although some critics say that she was being similarly hard on herself, Lowell set forth the 71-line poem as having every cliche and every technical error which a poem can have. Y et she also said, It loosed a bolt in my brain and I found out where my true function lay (Damon, p. 148).At age twenty-eight she had discovered her life history to be a poet. In 1910 four of Lowells sonnets were accepted for progeny by the Atlantic Monthly. A quick-frozen Idea, published first, appeared in August of that year. By 1912 she had published her first book of poetry, A Dome of Many-Colored drinking glass the title 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 lifeless classicism, can never rouse 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 Ada 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 unneurotic and were committed to each o ther until Lowells death. Russell was Lowells companion, providing love and emotional support, as well as the practical skill of organizing Lowells busy life. Biographer Richard Benvenuto observed that Lowells great creative output between 1914 and 1925 would not have been possible without her friends steadying, load-bearing(a) presence (p. 0). The following year Lowell discovered some poems in Poetry by Hilda Doolittle, signed H. D. Imagiste. Lowell felt an identification with the style of H. D. s poetry and determined to discover more about it. Armed with a letter of introduction from Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, Lowell traveled to capital of the linked Kingdom to meet Ezra cock, head of the imagist movement. In London Lowell not only learned about imagism and free verse from nose, but she also met many poets, some(prenominal) of whom became lifelong friends.Over the years Lowell would develop many literary friendships that resulted in an enormous volume of literary corresp ondence, requiring Lowell to employ two full-time secretaries. Lowell not only supported and encouraged other poets with her writing, such as her favorable review of Robert Frosts North of Boston in the New Republic (20 Feb. 1915), but also with specie and gifts. Lowells poems began to appear in increasing numbers in journals, and she was becoming 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 competent by Lowell, Amygism. Lowell became the spokesperson of imagism, leading the fight for the renewal of poetry in her homeland (Francis, p. 510), and her efforts were tireless. She traveled throughout the country, selling 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 inst antaneous phenomenal rise to fame (Gould, p. 139).Lowells first book of criticism, Six French Poets (1915), found on a series of her lectures, was also well received. Lowell was publishing a book a year, alternate between volumes of short verse and longer poems. Men, Women and Ghosts (1916) was highly regarded and contained Patterns one of her most famous poems. In it an eighteenth-century woman, manner of walking in her garden, contemplates a future that has suddenly become empty because of the loss of her fiance in dispute she mourns the fact that the Patterns of her role required her to remain chaste before marriage.The next year she published another(prenominal) critical volume, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, which included essays on six contemporary poets Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, H. D. , and John Gould Fletcher. Lowell also published anthologies of imagist poets in 1915, 1916, and 1917. Her next volume of poetry, Can G randes Castle (1918), included four long poems 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 please 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 celebration of lesbian devotion. Legends (1921) contains cardinal 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 helpless on English translations by Florence Wheelock Ayscough, which Lowell then turned back into poetry. A Critical Fable (1922) is a long, humorous poem, evaluating the state of contemporary poetry. Originally published anonymously, th e 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 address at Yale honoring Keats on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth. The lecture stimulated 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.