20 Facts About Amy Lowell

1.

Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school, which promoted a return to classical values.

2.

Amy Lowell posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

3.

Amy Lowell was born on February 9,1874, in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell.

4.

Amy Lowell considered herself to be developing "masculine" and "ugly" features and she was a social outcast.

5.

Amy Lowell had a reputation among her classmates for being outspoken and opinionated.

6.

Amy Lowell never attended college because her family did not consider it proper for a woman to do so.

7.

Amy Lowell compensated for this lack with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting.

8.

Amy Lowell lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe.

9.

Amy Lowell was said to be lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell were reputed to be lovers.

10.

Amy 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.

11.

Amy Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez.

12.

Amy Lowell publicly smoked cigars, as newspapers of the day frequently mentioned.

13.

Amy Lowell's admirers defended her even after her death.

14.

Amy Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925, at the age of 51 and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

15.

Amy Lowell's first published work appeared in 1910 in Atlantic Monthly.

16.

An additional group of uncollected poems was added to the volume The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, published in 1955 with an introduction by Untermeyer, who considered himself her friend.

17.

Amy Lowell's book Fir-Flower Poets was a poetical re-working of literal translations of the works of ancient Chinese poets, notably Li Tai-po.

18.

Amy Lowell published not only her own work, but that of other writers.

19.

Amy Lowell said that Imagism was weak before she took it up, whereas others said it became weak after Pound's "exile" towards Vorticism.

20.

Amy Lowell admitted to John Livingston Lowes that Russell was the subject of her series of romantic poems titled "Two Speak Together".