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Amy Lowell

Amy Lawrence Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1874. She was the sister of Harvard University President Abbott Lawrence Lowell and astronomer Percival Lowell.

Amy left her private schooling at seventeen to take care of her parents. However, she continued to teach herself. Amy wrote her first poem in 1902, after he saw actress Eleonora Duse. The two never had a relationship.

In 1909, Amy met the love of her life, Ada Russell, another actress. The two remained a couple until Amy died on May 11, 1925, at 5:30 AM. Ada stayed by Amy's side the entire time.

Amy's work includes A Dome of Many-Colored Glass (1912), Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), John Keats (biography; 1925), What's O'clock? (1925), and Ballads for Sale (1927). What's O'clock? won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926.

Amy was also known for smoking and using strong language, which wasn't really accepted by women of that time. Much of her work was even criticized. This includes Six French Poets (1915), Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916), Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), Pictures of the Floating World (1919), A Critical Fable (1922), East Wind (1926), and Selected Poems (1928).

Lowell is accredited with introducing imagist poetry to the US. At first, Amy tried to cover up lesbianism in her poetry. However, as time went one, she became more erotic in her writing. "A Decade" is a poem about the tenth anniversary of Amy and Ada.


"For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives."--Amy Lowell
[from The Boston Athenaeum in A Dome of Many-Colored Glass (1912)]


"All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words."--Amy Lowell
(from Sword Blades and Poppy Seed)


TAXI
When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?


VENUS TRANSIENS
Tell me,
Was Venus more beautiful
Than you are,
When she topped
The crinkled waves,
Drifting shoreward
On her plaited shell?
Was Botticelli's vision
Fairer than mine;
And were the painted rosebuds
He tossed his lady,
Of better worth
Than the words I blow about you
To cover your too great loveliness
As with a gauze
Of misted silver?
For me,
You stand poised
In the blue and buoyant air,
Cinctured by bright winds,
Treading the sunlight.
And the waves which precede you
Ripple and stir
The sands at my feet.


DECADE
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savor,
But I am completely nourished.


THE GARDEN BY MOONLIGHT
A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snowball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies' delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the checkered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.


IN EXCELSIS
You -- you --
Your shadow is sunlight on a plate of silver;
Your footsteps, the seeding-place of lilies;
Your hands moving, a chime of bells across a windless air.
The movement of your hands is the long, golden running of light from a rising sun;
It is the hopping of birds upon a garden-path.
As the perfume of jonquils, you come forth in the morning.
Young horses are not more sudden than your thoughts,
Your words are bees about a pear-tree,
Your fancies are the gold-and-black striped wasps buzzing among red apples.
I drink your lips,
I eat the whiteness of your hands and feet.
My mouth is open,
As a new jar I am empty and open.
Like white water are you who fill the cup of my mouth,
Like a brook of water thronged with lilies.
You are frozen as the clouds,
You are far and sweet as the high clouds.
I dare to reach to you,
I dare to touch the rim of your brightness.
I leap beyond the winds,
I cry and shout,
For my throat is keen as is a sword
Sharpened on a hone of ivory.
My throat sings the joy of my eyes,
The rushing gladness of my love.
How has the rainbow fallen upon my heart?
How have I snared the seas to lie in my fingers
And caught the sky to be a cover for my head? How have you come to dwell with me,
Compassing me with the four circles of your mystic lightness,
So that I say "Glory! Glory!" and bow before you
As to a shrine?
Do I tease myself that morning is morning and a day after?
Do I think the air is a condescension,
The earth a politeness,
Heaven a boon deserving thanks?
So you -- air -- earth -- heaven --
I do not thank you,
I take you,
I live.
And those things which I say in consequence
Are rubies mortised in a gate of stone.


Sappho (600 BC)
Katherine Fowler (1631-1664)
Aphra Behn (1640?-1689)
Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1698)
Anna Seward (1747-1809)
Wu Tsao (1800)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Katherine Bradley (1848-1915) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913)
Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929)
Charlotte Mew (1869-1929)
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Renée Vivien (1877-1909)
Angelina Weld Grimké (1880)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986)

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