Do you remember the poets we read in junior high school—Vachel Lindsay, Stephen Vincent Benet, et al?  Well, Amy Lowell is proper company for that group with most of the poems in this volume being in traditional abab rhyming and full of romantic notions of unrequited love and loss.  The nature poems are quite beautiful and made the reading tolerable, but the real joy of reading this book was not related to the poetry, but  to the twofold pleasure of discovering this fascinating woman and the joy of holding a 100 year old book in my hand complete with the handwritten bookplate in the front from the Concord Free Public Library and the date of entry, Sept. 1925.

You can read one of Lowell’s poems in the link in this month’s update, and you should also take the time to read about her in Wikipedia.  I had been aware of her name through awareness of her older brother Abbott Lawrence Lowell who was President of Harvard from 1909 to 1933, and I had seen her library which has been reconstructed in Harvard’s rare book library, Houghton, but neither had registered with me.  Reading about her, however, I discovered that she was a leading force working to move poetry into the mainstream in schools and publishing houses in the early years of the 20th C.  She was also a powerful advocate for new styles in poetry, dubbing Ezra Pound’s and Hilda Doolittle’s work as Imagism and creating the essential characteristics of that school.   Her contributions to poetry were recognized by the awarding of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize the year after this book was published which was also the year she died at 54.

She was a devotee of Keats and published a 1300 page biography of the poet. Her 950 poems were published in six volumes of verse and two volumes of literary criticism.  Her library collected and open to the public in Houghton is truly impressive.  Not a big fan of her poetry, but a big fan of the person.