ABSTRACT
Amy Lowell’s self-creation narrative begins with an epiphinal moment watching the Italian actress Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) perform in Boston in October of 1902. Writing to Poetry magazine’s associate editor Eunice Tietjens 20 years later, Lowell passionately remembered “the sensations that Duse’s acting gave me,” claiming that “what really happened” as she watched the performance “was that it revealed me to myself.”1 Returning home from the theater that evening, Lowell, then 28, wrote a 71-line blank verse poem, “Eleonora Duse,” honoring the actress.2 This was Lowell’s first poem since childhood, and although it would be another eight years of careful work and study before she published any of her poetry, she marked this as the beginning of her career as a poet: “it loosed a bolt in my brain and I found out what my true function was.”3 Lowell would return to Duse at the end of her career, writing eight more poems honoring the actress, including a series of sonnets which end What’s O’Clock, the last volume published before her death. These poems, however, are not so much about Duse as they are about Lowell’s response to Duse. At these two important junctures in her life, when she first thought about what kind of poet she wanted to be, and during her final illnesses, when she contemplated the poetic legacy she wanted to leave, Lowell drew on the feelings engendered in her by Duse in order to explore what it means to be moved-emotionally, erotically, and aesthetically-by the pathos and dignity of a diva figure.
