ABSTRACT
When Americans awoke on May 13th, 1925 to the news that the poet Amy Lowell had died of a stroke, many responded with grief and astonishment. Though she had been in ill-health for years, and had last appeared in public a month earlier at a banquet honoring her achievements looking frail and aged, few believed the fifty-one year old poet near death. In fact, few believed Amy Lowell could die. Memorial tributes used phrases such as “a principality and a power,” and “a national phenomenon,” to convey the degree to which she had captivated the American reading public. During her short thirteen year career, beginning with the publication of her first volume of poetry in 1912, Lowell produced eight volumes of poetry, two volumes of criticism, a two-volume biography of John Keats, and numerous articles and reviews. Her output was so prodigious that three more volumes of poetry were published posthumously, the first of which, What’s O’Clock, won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize. Her poetry and literary criticism topped best-seller lists, with volumes going into second and third printings almost immediately. Yet in the three-quarters of a century since her death, the woman of whom Louis Untermeyer once said, “no poet living in America has been more fought for, fought against, and generally fought about,” virtually fell out of literary history, appearing, if at all, as a footnote to discussions of more canonical modern poets like Ezra Pound, H.D., and Robert Frost.2 The Amy Lowell remembered today is more often than not characterized as a wealthy, headstrong literary impresario rather than a poet in her own right, a self-indulgent, self-promoting autocrat.
