Kayla Logan
July 3, 2002
LITR 5535
Dr. Craig White

Research Journal: 

Amy Lowell and Her Place in Literary History 

            Although I found nothing directly comparing the Imagist movement with Romanticism, it is clear that the Romantic movement in England as well as in America influenced the work of Amy Lowell.  My original outline consisted of discussing Lowell's early interest in English and American Romantic poetry, proving that the influence of Romanticism inspired her Romantic personal attributes, and finding supporting evidence for my hypothesis that the Imagist movement was, in fact, a diluted form of Romanticism, seeking to express sublime emotion through intense verse that attempts to capture simply a moment or impression of complete cognition, often through experimentation with Eastern forms and topics.  Because my research focused on Amy Lowell, not the Imagist movement as a whole, I did not find scholarly writing in support of my hypothesis, but I can modify the statement to confidently state that Amy Lowell's brand of Imagism leaned heavily on her Romantic influences.

The amount of information and criticism concerning Amy Lowell is extensive.  Happily, the Alfred R. Neumann library contains practically all of Lowell's books, in addition to two frequently referenced biographies on Amy Lowell.  I began by reading some of Lowell's poetry and the introductions to her books, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1916), Pictures of the Floating World (1919), and Fir Flower Tablets (1921).  The last of these, Fir Flower Tablets, was written in conjunction with Florence Ayscough, a scholar of Asian texts and culture.  In addition to Lowell's own words introducing her poetry, I consulted a lengthy biography, entitled Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (1966) by S. Foster Damon and a shorter biography by Horace Gregory, entitled Amy Lowell: Portrait of the Poet in Her Time (1959).  Because much of Lowell's correspondence survives, many of the critical sources and both biographies pull extensively from her letters to her contemporaries, editors, and friends.  Because of this access to correspondence, and for the format of this journal, I will organize my analysis of each source based on the primary topic of useful information each contains.  The revised outline, then, focuses on three aspects of Lowell's career as poet.  First, her strong New England heritage and the pressures she faced as she challenged New England literary tradition. Secondly, her relationship to Realism and Modernism as expressed through her response to and from her contemporaries, namely, Robert Frost and Ezra Pound.  And lastly, I will discuss Lowell's relationship to the Romantic tradition, through her experience with American Romantics, Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. 

Because of her strong family roots in New England, the New England affluent social and literary communities closely observed Amy Lowell's career as a literary critic and writer.  Richard Hunt's, Amy Lowell:  A Sketch of her Life and Her Place in Cotemporary American Literature (1917), offers a detailed overview of Lowell's family tree.  Hunt acknowledges the strong literary heritage of the Lowell family in America.  Even Percival Lowell, a merchant from Bristol, Somerset, England who helped colonize Newburyport beginning in 1637, wrote poetry, though he admitted that it was poor.  Amy Lowell's great-grandfather, John Lowell, was a direct descendant of Percival Lowell and wrote for a local New England newspaper under the pseudonym, "The Boston Rebel" and "The Norfolk Farmer."  Probably the most successful poet of the Lowell family was poet, James Russell Lowell, who was actually a distant nephew of Amy Lowell.

Amy Lowell's brothers, were both well known for intellectual pursuits, while the remainder of her direct line prospered from "a general good standing in business and the professions" (Hunt 3).  One brother, A. Lawrence Lowell was president of Harvard University.  The other, named after his American primogenitor, was Professor Percival Lowell, who was an expert on Eastern history and culture and studied astronomy, getting acclaim for discovering the canals on Mars.   Amy Lowell's grandfather, John Amory Lowell, was a pioneer in the New England cotton industry and the family's strong interest in horticulture was carried on by her father, Augustus Lowell.  Hunt, as well as many other critics, comments that Amy Lowell's true strengths came from her shrewd business sense which caused her to become a proponent for the modern poetry movement, a promoter for rising poets such as Robert Frost, and a strong and an uncompromising figure in the advancement of her personal opinions on the nature of poetics.

Hunt ends his overview by fully acknowledging Amy Lowell as a true, and exonerated New England poet in the following lines:

She is concerned with "the best that is known and thought in the world."   It is her inherent New England culture expressing itself in terms of the new age.  Provincialism and Puritanism have given way to cosmopolitanism and the liberal outlook, without any sacrifice of good literary taste and respect for the best traditions.  It was the New England poet who not only nurtured the traditions of the mother country before America had realized its nationalism, but who first figured forth the objects and ideas which were peculiarly American (13-14).

It would be interesting to know, since no further critiques by Richard Hunt were found, if Hunt still hailed Amy Lowell as a true New England poet after the year 1917.   Lowell grew increasingly unconventional in her poetic form and her views of modern poetry, forging even farther into the realms of Imagism and finally into  Eastern styles of poetry and translation before her death in 1925.

            Another valuable source for gaining an understanding of New England's reception of Amy Lowell is Ellery Sedgwick III's,  "'Fireworks':  Amy Lowell and the Atlantic Monthly."  Published in 1978 by the New England Quarterly, this source contains highlights and explanation of Amy Lowell's oftentimes-heated correspondence with Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of Atlantic Monthly from 1908 to 1937.  Sedgwick III sees the correspondence between his relative namesake and Amy Lowell as "a paradigm of the confrontation between those who wished radically to remake American poetry and those who defended traditional tastes" (489).  After reading this source, I must believe that although Richard Hunt is extremely complimentary of Amy Lowell's skill and tastes, there was, in fact, a large population that was not so enamored of her unconventional style and methods.   Ellery Sedgwick, the editor, was, "by temperament and education an aesthetic conservative, whose magazine and its readership represented precisely that orthodoxy among the poetry reading public that Miss Lowell intended to undermine" (489).  The correspondence between the two literary figures reveals mutual respect, but sharp disagreements and sometimes biting denunciations of the opinions and writing of the other. 

To Sedgwick (and his readership), the Imagist movement was proof of "cultural breakdown" because it ruined the traditional forms of poetry, but also something worse - the "weakening of the intellectual and spiritual scope of poetry" (495).  While Sedgwick maintained that poetry was more appropriately likened to "architecture and sculpture than to painting" (499), Lowell insisted that her work had beauty and merit beyond the Victorian ideals upheld by the Atlantic Monthly and continued to submit her own poetry as well as that of her cohorts within the Imagist movement.  After Lowell's death in 1925, Sedgwick humbly declined the request to write an article on Lowell's life and works for Encyclopaedia Britannica.  He claimed that he distrusted his technical knowledge of her writing.  However, as Ellery Sedgwick III states, "He was wise to refuse...[because] he also lacked sympathy with the aims of her work" (507-508).

            These two sources reveal opposing views to the reception of Amy Lowell's poetry among the New England literary community.  I believe Sedgwick III's account is probably the more accurate reflection of Amy Lowell's relationship to traditional New England literary values.  That is, I believe that for the most part, the majority of New England traditionalists did not accept Lowell until after her death and the posthumous awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

Through my research I have come to realize that Amy Lowell's works cannot easily be characterized by one literary period in America.  Born in 1874 into a traditionally conservative environment, one cannot deny that Lowell was strongly influenced by the Realism of the late 19^th century.  Almost every source, at some point, discusses the realistic nature of Lowell's poetry and prose.  The stronger connection, however, is to the Modernist period during which Amy Lowell actually wrote and published her works.  Lowell's connection to the Modernist period is reflected in her relationship with Modern poets, Robert Frost and Ezra Pound.  Two articles,  "A Decade of 'Stirring Times':  Robert Frost and Amy Lowell" by Lesley Lee Francis (1986), and "Outselling the Modernisms of Men:  Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification" by Melissa Bradshaw (2000), discuss Lowell's contrasting relationships with Frost and Pound.

            Lesley Lee Francis, granddaughter of Robert Frost, writes her article "A Decade of 'Stirring Times': Robert Frost and Amy Lowell" based on correspondence between the two poets as well as a variety of other sources by Frost and Lowell themselves.  This source reveals touching and funny stories and witticisms exchanged by Amy Lowell and Robert Frost.  Lesley Lee Frances even includes a copy of a letter given to her mother, Lesley (Frost's daughter), instructing her to buy a copy of Lowell's latest book and go visit Lowell at her house at Sevenels.  Robert Frost respected Lowell as one with whom he had, "joined forces in a common rebellion against the trite Romantic attitudes and the outworn, false generalities of the previous generation" (522).  Although Amy Lowell fit in with the general ideas of poetry held by Frost and other Modernists, she was different too.  Robert Frost and Lowell agreed that they both had a love of the dramatic, but Frost states that his tragedies lacked a villain, while Lowell could not have a tragedy without one (517).  I think that in great part, the differences between Frost and Lowell were due to Lowell's strong ties to the Romantic tradition, in which she steeped herself.

            Oddly, I think that more similarities in poetic theory could be recognized between Lowell and Ezra Pound than Lowell and Robert Frost.  This is odd because she had such a friendly relationship with Frost, and an extremely turbulent and later, detached relationship with Ezra Pound, which is noted in many sources.  In her article, "Outselling the Modernisms of Men:  Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification," Melissa Bradshaw admits that she "had an investment in reading Lowell as the anti-Pound" based on her idea that Pound was too elitist and that Lowell tried to "democratize" poetry for popular culture.  But Bradshaw admits that Lowell's and Pound's "ends, if not their means, are similar as they manipulate the terms of the twentieth-century marketplace" (165).  In addition to their similar agendas for modern poetry, Bradshaw also comments on their "sanctimonious repudiation of moral didacticism in poetry" (152).    Bradshaw points out that this is in-keeping with the idea of Romantic poets (especially Keats).  In fact, Bradshaw's research and commentary often include comparisons of the ideals and spirit of the Modernist period to the Romantic traditions set forth by Keats, Poe, Coleridge, and Whitman. 

            Interestingly, Lowell had some very strong notions about comparisons of Whitman's work and her own.  She declared that Whitman was "chiefly propagandist and only afterwards poet" (the pot calling the kettle black so to speak) and further separated her works from Whitman's by stating that Whitman, "fell into his own peculiar form through ignorance...[while modern poets] are perfectly conscious artists writing in a medium not less carefully ordered because it is based upon cadence and not upon metre" (Bradshaw 155).  Lowell's anti-Whitman statements caused a public row among the audience at the celebration of the Whitman Centenary in Philadelphia, 1920.

            Linking Amy Lowell to Romanticism is not, however, entirely out of the question, nor is linking the Modernist period itself with Romanticism.  Two sources, Van Wyck Brooks' collection of essays, A Chilmark Miscellany (1948), and Percy Boynton's Some Contemporary Americans: The Personal Equation in Literature (1924) explore the Romantic nature of Modernism and Amy Lowell's poetry. 

            In A Chilmark Miscellany, Brooks compares the entire Modernist movement to the American Romantic movement, asking, "Were they not repeating the pattern of 1840, when the young had been rebels at the outset?"  Claiming that Emerson (and even all New Englanders) were proponents for "flouting tradition,"  Brooks continues his argument, stating that E.E. Cummings "was a new way of being Thoreau at Walden," that Edna Millay's work was not far from Margaret Fuller, and that Robert Frost "revived, for a new generation, the part of the poet-seer of Emerson's day" (262-3).  It seems that by 1948, the view of Modernism and "New Poetry" as truly original and innovative has faded, and critics begin to see Modernism as merely another reactionary era in American literature. 

            The similarities between Lowell's works and American Romanticism had already been recognized, however, even in 1924 before her death.  In his book, Some Contemporary Americans: The Personal Equation in Literature, Percy Boynton enumerates six stylistic similarities of Lowell's Imagist verse with Thoreau's prose in Walden.  Boynton continues to deflate Lowell's originality by asserting that her 'polyphonic prose' was actually used by Walt Whitman in 1855, and that her vers libre (French in origin) was nothing new in America because it also appeared in Whitman's Leaves of Grass (78-79).  Boynton goes on to comment that Lowell's poetry points to "an experience of yearnings and desires unsatisfied or of passion fulfilled" (84-85).  Recognizing Lowell's strong influence of Romanticism, Boynton asserts that, however much she would like to deny it, Lowell's work is built on "a foundation of old-fashioned literary formalism" (85).   The critiques of Brooks and Boynton, I think, justify that Lowell's brand of Imagism, is, at its very core, derived from Romantic tradition.

            I think that a continuation of this path of research could support the hypothesis that because of Lowell's Romantic tendencies in her works as well as in her strong personal values for individualism and rebellion, and because Lowell shaped the Imagist movement, the Imagist movement itself is Romantic in theme and literary goals.  That is, like Romanticism, Imagism seeks to create the sublime in literature, often using natural images.  Like the goal of Romantic lyric poetry, the Imagists wanted to create a moment or impression of complete cognition; only the Imagists tried to accomplish this by stripping down the language-allowing no 'unnecessary' words to enter into their poems. 

The Imagist poetry that really intrigues me is the Eastern, haiku-style poetry that Amy Lowell wrote (not the translated stuff) toward the end of her career.  Lowell's fascination with Eastern culture and literary tradition (perhaps stimulated and increased by her brother's interest) is also Romantic in a way.  The Eastern subjects of many of Lowell's poems romanticize the East, and certainly display a love of the exotic and far away.  I will end with one of Amy Lowell's poems that, I think, exemplifies a uniting of Imagism and Romanticism due to the natural subject, the haunting use of light and dark, the romanticizing of the far away, and the effort to create a moment of complete cognition and feeling.

Wind and Silver

                                                Greatly shining.

                                                The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky:

                                                And the fish-ponds shake their backs and flash their

                                                            dragon scales

                                                As she passes over them.

Works Cited

Boynton, Percy H.  Some Contemporary Americans:  The Personal Equation in Literature.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1924. 

Bradshaw, Melissa.  "Outselling the Modernisms of Men:  Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification."  Victorian Poetry 38.1 (2000):  141-169.

Brooks, Van Wyck.  A Chilmark Miscellany.  New York:  E.P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated, 1948.

Francis, Lesley Lee.  "A Decade of 'Stirring Times':  Robert Frost and Amy Lowell."  New England Quarterly  59(4)  Dec (1986):  509 - 522.

 .Hunt, Richard.  Amy Lowell:  A Sketch of Her Life and Her Place in contemporary American Literature.  New York:  The Macmillan Company, 1917.

Lowes, John Livingston, ed.  Selected Poems of Amy Lowell.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928.

Sedgwick III, Ellery.  "'Fireworks':  Amy Lowell and the Atlantic Monthly."  New England Quarterly  51(4)  Dec (1978):  489 - 508.

Works Consulted

Ambrose, Jane P.  "Amy Lowell and the Music of her Poetry."  New England Quarterly  62(1)  Mar (1989):  45 - 62.

Ayscough, Francis and Amy Lowell.  Fir-Flower Tablets.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921.

Brown, Thomas.  "The 'Little Controversy' over Magenta:  Amy Lowell and the South Carolinians."  English Language Notes 22(1)  Sept (1984):  63-66.

Damon, S. Foster.  Amy Lowell:  A Chronicle.  Hamden, Connecticut:  Archon Books, 1966.

Galvin, Mary E.  Queer Poetics:  Five Modernist Women Writers.  Westport, Connecticut:  Praeger Publishers, 1999.

Gregory, Horace.  Amy Lowell:  Portrait of the Poet in Her Time.  New York:  Books for Libraries Press, 1958.

Lowell, Amy.  Pictures of the Floating World.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919.

---.  Sword Blades and Poppy Seed.  New York:  The Macmillan Company, 1916.

Lowes, John Livingston.  Essays in Appreciation.  New York:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1936.

Sergeant, Elizabeth.  Fire Under the Andes:  A Group of Literary Portraits.  Port Washington, New York:  Kennikat Press, Incorporated, 1927.