ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to rescue Amy Lowell from detrimental appraisals by proposing an alternative background for assessing her poetry: the Impressionist music of Claude Debussy. Partly predating, partly contemporaneous with Imagism, musical Impressionism, as exemplified in the work of Debussy, offers an alternative aesthetic response to a similar intellectual climate. For Ezra Pound, pattern music, be it in the form of Johann Sebastian Bach’s work or George Antheil’s, has its direct opposite in “impression music, colour music, programme music”—music he associates with the work of Claude Debussy. If Claude Debussy provided Pound with an example of what he emphatically wished his poetry not to be, the composer’s music had the opposite effect on Amy Lowell. Debussy’s and Lowell’s devotion to Impressionist aesthetics makes itself felt on several fronts. Some of Lowell’s lyrics likewise unsettle intellectually apperceived structure, even though, as in Debussy’s work, it is never entirely absent.
