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Amy Lowell was born 9 February 1874 in Brookline, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States to Augustus Lawrence Lowell (1830-1900) and Katharine Bigelow Lawrence (1832-1895) and died 12 May 1925 Massachusetts, United States of unspecified causes.

Biography

Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

Early Life

Amy Lowell was a member of the wealthy Boston, Massachusetts, Lowell family of Boston Brahmin ancestry. She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 1862, the sister of Percival Lawrence Lowell and Elizabeth Lowell (1862-1935) and Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856-1943).

School was a source of considerable despair for the young Amy Lowell. She considered herself to be developing "masculine" and "ugly" features and she was a social outcast. She had a reputation among her classmates for being outspoken and opinionated.

Lowell never attended college because her family did not consider it proper for a woman to do so. She compensated for this lack with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 (age 28) after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe.

Lowell was said to be lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell were reputed to be lovers. Russell is reputed to be the subject of Lowell's more erotic works, most notably the love poems contained in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection of Pictures of the Floating World. The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Pound considered Lowell's embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hijacking of the movement. Lowell has been linked romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence of any contact between them is a brief correspondence about a planned memorial for Duse.

Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez.


Lowell smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. She was associated with her cigar-smoking habit publicly, since newspapers frequently mentioned it.[3] A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that poet Witter Bynner once said, in a cruel comment repeated by Ezra Pound and thereafter commonly misattributed to him, that she was a "hippopoetess."[4] Her admirers defended her, however, even after her death. One rebuttal was written by Heywood Broun in his obituary tribute to Amy. He wrote, "She was upon the surface of things a Lowell, a New Englander and a spinster. But inside everything was molten like the core of the earth... Given one more gram of emotion, Amy Lowell would have burst into flame and been consumed to cinders." [5]


Grave of Amy Lowell in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925, at the age of 51 and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.[6] The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock. That collection included the patriotic poem "Lilacs", which Louis Untermeyer said was the poem of hers he liked best.








Siblings


Offspring of Augustus Lawrence Lowell (1830-1900) and Katharine Bigelow Lawrence (1832-1895)
Name Birth Death Joined with
Percival Lawrence Lowell (1855-1916) 13 March 1855 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States 12 November 1916 Flagstaff, Coconino County, Arizona, United States Constance Savage Keith (1863-1954)
Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856-1943) 13 December 1856 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States 6 January 1943 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States Anna Parker Lowell (1856-1928)
Katharine Lowell (1858-1925) 27 November 1858 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States 9 February 1925 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States Alfred Roosevelt (1856-1891)
Thomas James Bowlker (1858-1917)
Roger Lowell (1862-1863)
Elizabeth Lowell (1862-1935) 2 February 1862 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States 5 June 1935 Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States William Lowell Putnam (1861-1924)
May Lowell (1870-1870)
Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874-1925) 9 February 1874 Brookline, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States 12 May 1925 Massachusetts, United States


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