Sometimes when all the world seems grey and dun
And nothing beautiful, a voice will cry,
“Look out, look out! Angels are drawing nigh!”
Then my slow burdens leave me one by one,
And swiftly does my heart arise and run
Even like a child while loveliness goes by—
And common folk seem children of the sky,
And common things seem shapèd of the sun.
Oh, pitiful! that I who love them, must
So soon perceive their shining garments fade!
And slowly, slowly, from my eyes of trust
Their flaming banners sink into a shade!
While this earth’s sunshine seems the golden dust
Slow settling from that radiant cavalcade.
_Amy Lowell_
Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, February 9, 1874,
of a long line of noted publicists and poets, the first colonist (a
Percival Lowell) arriving in Newburyport in 1637. James Russell
Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather; Abbott Lawrence, her
mother’s father, was minister to England; and Abbott Lawrence
Lowell, her brother, is president of Harvard University.
Miss Lowell obtained her early education through private tuition and
travel abroad. These European journeys were the background upon
which much of Miss Lowell’s later work is unconsciously woven; her
visits to France, Egypt, Turkey and Greece bore fruit, many years
later, in the exotic colors of her verse. As a young girl, she had
vague aspirations toward being a writer; but it was not until 1902,
when she was twenty-eight years old, that she definitely determined
to be a poet. For eight years she served a rigorous and solitary
apprenticeship, reading the classics of all schools and countries,
studying the technique of verse, exercising her verbal power—but
never attempting to publish a single line. In 1910 her first verse
was printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_; two years later her first
book appeared.
This volume, _A Dome of Many-colored Glass_ (1912), was a strangely
unpromising first book. The subjects were as conventional as the
treatment of them; the influence of Keats and Tennyson was evident;
the tone was soft and sentimental, almost without a trace of
personality. It was a queer prologue to the vivid _Sword Blades and
Poppy Seed_ (1914), which marked not only an extraordinary advance
but a totally new individuality. This second volume contained many
distinctive poems written in the usual forms, a score of pictorial
pieces illustrating Miss Lowell’s identification with the Imagists
(see Preface) and, possibly most important from a technical
standpoint, the first appearance in English of “polyphonic prose.”
Of this extremely flexible form, which has only begun to be
exploited, Miss Lowell, in an essay on John Gould Fletcher, has
written, “‘Polyphonic’ means ‘many-voiced,’ and the form is
so-called because it makes use of the ‘voices’ of poetry, namely:
meter, _vers libre_, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and return. It
employs every form of rhythm, even prose rhythm at times.”
It was because of such experiments in form and technique that Miss
Lowell first attracted attention and is still best known. But,
beneath her preoccupation with theories and novelty of utterance,
one listens to the skilled story-teller, to the designer of
arabesques, to the narrator who (_vide_ such poems as “A Lady,”
“Vintage” and the later “Bronze Horses”) revivifies history with
creative excitement.
_Men, Women and Ghosts_ (1916) brims with this contagious vitality;
it is richer in variety than its predecessors, swifter in movement,
surer in artistry. It is, in common with all of Miss Lowell’s work,
best in its portrayal of the colors and sounds of physical rather
than the reactions of emotional experience. She is, preëminently,
the poet of the external world; her pictures are as “hard and clear”
as the most uncompromising Imagist could desire. The colors with
which her works are studded seem like bits of bright enamel; every
leaf and flower has a lacquered brilliance. To compensate for the
lack of personal warmth, Miss Lowell feverishly agitates all she
touches; nothing remains quiescent. Whether she writes about a fruit
shop, or a flower-garden in Roxbury, or a window-full of red
slippers, or a string quartet, or a Japanese print—everything
flashes, leaps, startles, spins and burns with an almost savage
intensity; a dynamic speed dizzies one. Here motion frequently takes
the place of emotion.
In _Can Grande’s Castle_ (1918), Miss Lowell achieves a broader
line; the teller of stories, the bizarre decorator and the
experimentalist are finally fused. The poems in this volume are only
four in number—four polyphonic prose poems of almost epic length,
but they are extraordinarily varied in music, sweeping in their
sense of magnitude and time. _Pictures of the Floating World_ (1919)
which followed is, in many ways, Miss Lowell’s most personal
revelation. Although there are several pages devoted to the merely
dazzling and grotesque, most of these poems are in a quieter key; a
new restraint gives unsuspected overtones to stanzas that have much
in common with the earlier “Patterns” where the narrative, the
character and the thing observed are inextricably knit.
Besides Miss Lowell’s original poetry, she has made many studies in
Japanese and Chinese poetry reflecting, even in her own work, their
Oriental colors and contours. She has also written two volumes of
critical essays: _Six French Poets_ (1915) and _Tendencies in Modern
American Poetry_ (1917), both of them invaluable aids to the student
of contemporary literature.