ABSTRACT
Amy Lowell was fat. She was also rich, headstrong, opinionated, self-promoting, cigar-smoking, and lesbian. But mostly, she was fat. These observations should seem out of place in a serious book about a literary figure. After all, what Lowell looked like should be less important than what she wrote, where it was published, its influence, and the place it occupies in modernist poetry. And yet her body and her personality find their way into much of what has been written about Lowell in a way that those of her thinner contemporaries do not. In fact, the scholar who attempts to research and write about Lowell must sift through an inordinate amount of demeaning and irrelevant commentary about her person in order to find information about her work. The result of this insistent emphasis on the body of a long-dead poet is the construction of an Amy Lowell who present-day readers understand primarily as a joke-an obnoxious woman who bought her way into a literary movement-rather than as an artist and critic who played a key role in developing and promoting a modernist poetics.
