- Born
- 9 February 1874Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
- Died
- 12 May 1925Brookline, Massachusetts, USA · aged 51
Amy Lowell
A forceful advocate of modern poetry, she wrote intimate love poems inspired by her life with Ada Dwyer Russell.
Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1874. She belonged to a wealthy Boston family but did not receive the university education available to its men. Reading widely, she developed her own literary education and published her first poetry collection in 1912, aged 38.
Lowell became a prominent advocate of Imagism, which favoured precise images and direct language. She edited anthologies, lectured and championed free verse. Her energy also brought conflict: Ezra Pound, who had helped establish the movement, dismissed the poets gathered around her as practitioners of “Amygism”.
In 1912 Lowell met the actress Ada Dwyer Russell, who became her companion and shared her home. Russell inspired many of her love poems, including “Madonna of the Evening Flowers”. Their domestic life offered a setting for writing about affection between women without making the relationship explicit to every reader.
Lowell’s work ranged beyond lyric poetry to criticism and a substantial biography of John Keats. She died in 1925 at 51. Her collection “What’s O’Clock”, published after her death, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.