Abstract
On a cold, winter day in 1913, Amy Lowell picked up the latest issue of Poetry magazine and found between the covers her true identity and calling in life. She read, with little enthusiasm, the opening poem by Vachel Lindsay, “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven,” the elegiac “Waste Land” by Madison Cawein, and verse musing on happiness, sympathy, love, and the celestial sky. Then she came upon a vividly imagined, late-summer moment in these lines from a poem called “Priapus”:
I saw the first pear
As it fell.
The honey-seeking, golden-banded,
The yellow swarm
Was not more fleet than I,
(Spare us from loveliness!)
And I fell prostrate,
Crying,
Thou hast flayed us with thy blossoms;
Spare us the beauty
Of fruit-trees!…
Amy Lowell was their militant leader … a born promoter, as masterful as her forebears were, and the shrewdest of salesman … seeing that America was giving birth to a first-rate product, she put her shoulder to the wheel and pushed it on the market. The product was American poetry … For literary soldiership, or literary statesmanship, America had never seen Miss Lowell’s equal … she was the prime minister of the republic of poets … The poets had reason to thank their stars that they had a Lowell behind them, for whom editors and publishers were factory hands and office boys.1
—Van Wyck Brooks
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Notes
Quoted in Jean Gould, Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and the Imagist Movement (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), 199–200.
H. D., “Priapus,” Poetry, 1 (January 1913) 4, 118.
Harriet Monroe, “Notes,” Poetry (January 1913), 135.
Neil Roberts, A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 133.
See, for example, S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle with Extracts from Her Correspondence (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966 [1935]) and Gould, Amy.
In Amy Lowell (New York: Harold Vinal, 1926), another contemporary, Clement Wood, not exactly her friend, disparaged Lowell’s abilities as a poet and critic, concluding that her death would necessarily be followed by “silence,” not acclaim. Also see Melissa Bradshaw and Adrienne Munich, Selected Poems of Amy Lowell (2002) and Amy Lowell, American Modern. Eds. Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
Melissa Bradshaw, “Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification,” Victorian Poetry (Spring 2000), 141–69; and Amy Lowell: Selected Poems (New York: Library of America, 2004) with an introduction by Honor Moore.
Aaron Jaffe, “Adjectives and the Work of Modernism in an Age of Celebrity,” Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2003).
For more on the relationship between print culture and commerce, see Daniel Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
James West, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).
Susan Coultrap-McQuin analyzes the connection between women and noncommercial values such as love, hope, and charity in Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Convictions about the divide between literature and commerce may reflect what some historians of print culture refer to as a belief that mass culture led to “extensive” rather than “intensive” reading. That is, the reading revolution of the nineteenth century led to a focus on quantity rather than quality of reading; instead of lingering over texts, individuals consumed them much as they did toothpaste. For more on this division, see David Paul Nord, “Religious Reading and Readers in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 1995), 241–72. Nord also provides a taxonomy of reader response in Chicago during the 1910s and an analysis of the role played by interpretive communities in “Reading the Newspaper: Strategies and Politics of Reader Response, Chicago, 1912–1917,” Journal of Communication (Summer 1995), 66–103.
Louis Untermeyer, From Another World: The Autobiography of Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), 102.
See Erica Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1940 (Boston: MFA Publishers, 2001).
Quoted in Marilee Meyer, Inspiring Reform: Boston’s Arts and Crafts Movement (Wellesley, MA: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1997), 20.
Amy Lowell, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 19 1 2), 75–77. Lowell switched from Houghton Mifflin to the Macmillan Company, publishing with them from 1916 to 1919, then returned to Houghton Mifflin. Macmillan issued an edition of the collection in 1915.
Louis Untermeyer, The New Era in American Poetry (New York: Henry Holt, 1919), 140–41.
Arthur Davison Ficke, “Imagisme,” Poetry, 1 (March 1913) 6, 199 and Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts By An Imagist,” 200–206.
See Stanley Coffman’s Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951).
Cyrena Pondrom, “H. D. and the Origins of Imagism,” Sagetrieb, 1 (Spring 1985), 73–97.
William Pratt, The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963).
Pratt’s translation of Rene Taupin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1985); Timothy Materer, “Make It Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism,” in Marketing Modernisms (Dettmar and Watt), 17–36.
Pound quoted in Selected Letters of John Gould Fletcher. Eds. Lucas Carpenter et al. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996): 13. Daniel Albright discusses synesthesia and modern poetry in “Exhibiting Modernism: A View from the Air,” in Make It New: The Rise of Modernism. Ed. Kurt Heinzelman (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, 2004): 42.
Ben F. Johnson, Fierce Solitude: A Life of John Gould Fletcher (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 20, 43.
Walker, Masks Outrageous and Austere, 20. Also see Betsy Erkkila, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
For more information on H. D. and her literary circle, see Georgina Taylor, H. D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 19131946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Diana Collecott, H. D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Cassandra Laity, H. D. and the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Quoted in Walker, Masks Outrageous, 143. Lillian Faderman was the first scholar to analyze homosexual themes in Lowell’s writing. See “Warding Off the Watch and Ward Society: Amy Lowell’s Treatment of the Lesbian Theme,” Gay Books Bulletin 1 (Summer 1979): 23–27 and “Writing Lesbian” in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Perennial, 1998). For more on Lowell’s lesbian identity, her tracing of a female, homosexual lineage for modern poetry, and the use of vers libre to evoke a lesbian erotic sensibility, see Mary Galvin, Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999).
Particularly chapter 2, “Imagery and Invisibility: Amy Lowell and The Erotics of Particularity.” Also see Paul Lauter, “Amy Lowell and Cultural Borders,” in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers. Ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 199 7), 288–96.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers (New York: Harcourt Brace), 1936, 91.
Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 191.
Lowell, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (New York: Macmillan Co, 1914), vii.
Lowell, “A Consideration of Modern Poetry,” North American Review (January 1917).
Lowell, Sword Blades, xi. In 1893, Pater had declared in his famous conclusion to Renaissance that logic and theories detracted from the power of art and poetry. He deemed as successes those individuals who could “burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy.” The brief moments of splendor offered by beauty promised a curative effect: “While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.” Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 189.
Amy Lowell, Can Grande’s Castle (New York: Macmillan Co., 1918), xiv–v.
Lowell also cited Symbolist Remy de Gourmont’s epistemological stance: “The sole excuse which a man can have for writing is to write down himself, to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors himself in his individual glass … He should create his own aesthetics; and we should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds, and judge them for what they are and not for what they are not.” Amy Lowell, Some Imagist Poets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915).
Quoted in Kilmer, “How Does the New Poetry Differ from the Old?” NYT Magazine (26 March 1916),
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© 2011 Lisa Szefel
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Szefel, L. (2011). Paring Words, Crafting Images: The Economy of Authorship in the Literary Marketplace. In: The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118973_6
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