ABSTRACT
Few early twentieth-century writers have suffered such a dramatic fall from favour as Amy Lowell. Between 1912 and 1927, Lowell published 11 volumes of poetry (including three posthumous collections edited by her life-long companion Ada Dwyer Russell), edited three volumes of Imagist verse (Some Imagist Poets, 1915–1917) and played a central role in promoting and defending the ‘New Poetry’ in America. By 1922, she was ‘regarded as a “national institution” whose slow and laboured approach to a speaker’s lectern was the signal for the audience to rise’ (Ruilhley, 1975, p. 141). She also used her wealth and influence, as a member of the famous Boston Lowell family, to financially support and encourage other significant modernist poets, including H. D., Richard Aldington, and D. H. Lawrence. At the time of her death, Amy Lowell was one of the most prolific and successful poets of her time; a revered American ‘woman of letters’ who graced the cover of Time Magazine in March 1925, just months before her death. She had recently completed yet another daunting project; a two-volume biography of John Keats. A transatlantic lecture tour was planned – a trip that Lowell, sadly, never took, due to her death from a sudden stroke at the age of 51.
