Amy Lowell by Marcia Dinneen Essay

Amy Lo sanitarys flavour and Career Marcia B. Dinneen (http//www. english. illinois. edu/maps/poets/g_l/amylo easily/ bearing. htm) Amy Lo rise was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the girlfriend of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lawrence. Both sides of the family were New England aristocrats, wealthy and prominent fractions of society. Augustus Lowell was a businessman, civil leader, and horticulturalist, Katherine Lowell an accomplished thespian and linguist. Although casted as al near disreputable, poets were part of the Lowell family, including mob Russell Lowell, a number unrivaled off cousin, and later Robert Lowell.As the daughter of a wealthy family, Lowell was primary- grade give lessonsd at the family home, Sevenels (named by her make as a reference to the septette Lowells living there), by an incline governess who left-hand(a) her with a life unyielding inability to spell. Her kickoff gear poem, Chacago, written at bestride nine, is will to this problem. In the fall of 1883 Lowell began attending a series of private schools in Brookline and Boston. At school she was the terror of the faculty (Gould, p. 32). until now at Mrs.Cabots school, founded by a Lowell cousin to educate her hold children and the children of friends and relations, Lowell was totally indifferent to classroom decorum. Noisy, opinionated, and spoiled, she terrorized the other students and radius patronise to her teachers (Heymann, p. 164).During school vacations Lowell traveled with her family. She went to atomic number 63 and to New Mexico and California. On the latter spark off she kept a travel journal. Lowell enjoyed writing, and cardinal stories she wrote during this time were printed in Dream Drops or, Stories from fairy (1887), by a Dreamer. The volume was publish privately by her mother, who besides contri scarce ifed material, and the ingathering were donated to the Perkins Institute for the Blind. Lowells schooling include the usual classes in English, history, French, literature, and a petty Italian. As Lowell later noned, My family did non consider that it was necessary for girls to learn every Hellenic or Latin (Damon, p. 87). She would besides imbibe her formal education as non amounting to a hill of beans (Benvenuto, p. 6). School end in 1891, and Lowell made her entering. stilbesterolcribed as the most popular debutante of the season, she went to sixty dinners given in her honor.Her popularity was attributed to her skills in saltation and in the art of conversation, but her debut did non produce the expected conglutination proposal. Although Lowell had finished formal schooling, she continued to educate herself. Unfortunately, higher education was not an pick for Lowell women. She put herself through a crocked reading program, using her fathers 7,000-volume library and the resources of the Boston Athenaeum (her spectacular-grandfather was one of the founders). Later Lowell would successfull y speak by against the proposed relocation of the Athenaeum this would also blend in the subject of a poem.Lowells revel of adjudges themselves began with her first Rollo take for, Rollo Learning to Read, which her mother gave her when she was six. This demo marked the beginning of an enthusiasm for harbor collecting that would break throughout her life. In 1891 she made her first major bribe of a set of the complete workings of Sir Walter Scott with money she had received as a Christmas gift. It was, however, her collection of Keatsiana, including a rare first edition of Lamia inscribed to F. B. from J. K. ( croup Brawne from commode Keats), that put her in the forefront of multinational book collectors.Following her debut, Lowell led the life of a prominent socialite, visiting, going to parties and the t estruser, and traveling. Her mother, who had been an disable for historic period, died in 1895. A disappointment in love prompted a winter escape to Egypt in 1897- 1898. Lowell had accepted the proposal of a Bostonian whom she loved, but before the engagement was formally announced he became entangled elsewhere (Damon, p. 120). The family could do nothing to protect her unless guard tenaciously the name of the errant suitor (Gould, p. 65). The trip was also for wellness reasons.Doctors felt 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 summertime home in Dublin, New Hampshire, that she named Broomley Lacey. The ambit was home to the MacDowell Artists Colony as well as to other notable painters and sculptors. In Brookline Lowell assumed her fathers civic responsibilities. Early in 1902 she spoke against the reappointment of the aged(a) 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). ab initio booed, Lowell continued to speak with her usual frankness and, at the end, won applause as well as her point. Lowell became a member of the executive committee of the Brookline Education rescript and chair of its Library Board. In October 1902 Lowell became a poet. Her interest in indite had been increase beyond her childhood enthusiasm, fueled by her reading Leigh Hunts visual sensation and Fancy or, Selections from the English Poets,which she had found practiced the ceiling in her fathers library.The volume was a revelation to her, opening night a door that might other than have remained shut, Lowell remarked (Gould, p. 51). She had capture enamored of metrical composition and the poets Hunt discussed, particularly Keats. After she maxim Eleanora Duse perform one October night she wrote her first adult poem, Eleanora Duse. Although nearly critics say that she was uni indite too hard on herself, Lowell set forth the 71-li ne poem as having every cliche and every technical error which a poem laughingstock have. Yet she also said, It loosed a bolt in my point and I found out where my sure function lay (Damon, p. 148).At age twenty-eight she had discovered her calling to be a poet. In 1910 four of Lowells sonnets were accepted for publication by the Atlantic Monthly. A Fixed Idea, published first, appeared in August of that year. By 1912 she had published her first book of poetry, A Dome of Many-Colored applesauce 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 Un margeeyer 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 2 women has been described as platonic by some, as lesbian by others it wa s, in fact, a Boston marriage. They lived together and were attached to each other 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, supporting presence (p. 0). The following year Lowell discovered some poems in poem by Hilda Doolittle, signed H. D. Imagiste. Lowell felt an appellation with the style of H. D. s poetry and firm to discover more or so it. build up with a letter of introduction from song editor Harriet Monroe, Lowell traveled to London to chance upon Ezra hammer in, head of the imagist movement. In London Lowell not only learned about imagism and costless verse from Pound, but she also met legion(predicate) poets, several of whom became lifelong friends.Over the years Lowell would develop many literary fr iendships that resulted in an enormous volume of literary correspondence, requiring Lowell to utilisation two full-time secretaries. Lowell not only supported and encouraged other poets with her writing, much(prenominal) as her favorable review of Robert freezes North of Boston in the New Republic (20 Feb. 1915), but also with money and gifts. Lowells poems began to appear in increasing numbers in journals, and she was comme il faut 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 thrill of the imagist movement, and Pound would call the movement, as altered by Lowell, Amygism. Lowell became the spokesperson of imagism, leading the weightlift for the re overboldal 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 seeded player (1914), written in free verse and polyphonic prose, a Lowell invention, brought her an instantaneous phenomenal rise to fame (Gould, p. 139).Lowells first book of criticism, Six French Poets (1915), base on a series of her lectures, was also well received. Lowell was publishing a book a year, alternating 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, walking in her garden, contemplates a future that has suddenly become empty because of the loss of her fiance in battle she mourns the fact that the Patterns of her role call for her to remain chaste before marriage.The close year she published another captious volume, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, which include essays on six contemporary poets Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar downwind Masters, Carl Sandburg, H. D. , and can Gould Fletcher. Lowell also publi shed anthologies of imagist poets in 1915, 1916, and 1917. Her next volume of poetry, Can Grandes Castle (1918), included four long poems the title was taken from the name of the rubber where Dante, the Florentine exile, wrote portions of his Divine Comedy.Inspired by her lifelong interest in the Orient, Pictures of a Floating World (1919) is a interlingual rendition 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 cristal and The Weathercock Points South are described as a celebration of lesbian devotion. Legends (1921) contains eleven 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 dependent 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. to begin with published anonymously, the poem pokes fun at fellow poets and at Lowell herself in lines of rime couplets. The poem was modeled on pack 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 by chance 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 linked States but not in Britain, where she was accuse of writing a psychological thriller quite a than a literary biography. Lowell was angry and despondent but in typical means determined to confront the critics on their own turf.