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Amy Lowell |
Amy Lowell was the daughter of a wealthy Boston family, and a difficult child. She got engaged at twenty-three but the man reneged, and after that she went to Egypt for the “obesity cure” consisting of tomatoes and asparagus. It nearly killed her. At twenty-eight she resolved to become a poet and for several years it went poorly. But in 1914 she traveled to London, met Ezra Pound, and took over the Imagist movement, publishing at her own expense an annual anthology of the poets she liked. Pound called her version “Amygism”, but Lowell was not one to be deterred.
She was five feet tall, overweight, slept until three in the afternoon in a bed with 16 pillows, and then worked through the night with two secretaries handling her correspondence. She wore men’s suits, stopped the clocks in her room, draped the mirrors, smoked cigars, and had a “Boston marriage” with another woman who loved her and organized her life. By 1925 Lowell had become a wonderful poet as well as a powerful promoter, and the year she died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at fifty-one, she received the Pulitzer Prize.
Seeing You Stand Once More Before My Eyes
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |