Amy Lowell: Selected Poems

A cigar-smoking proponent of free- verse modernism in open rebellion against her distinguished Boston lineage, Amy Lowell cut an indelible public figure. But in the words of editor Honor Moore, “what strikes the modern reader is not the sophistication of Lowell’s feminist or anti-war stances, but the bald audacity of her eroticism.” Lowell was at the center of a group of pioneering modernists who, in an era convulsed by change, rejected musty Victorian standards and wrote poems of bracing immediacy. This new selection captures her full formal range: the “cadenced verse” of her Imagist masterpieces, her experiments in “polyphonic prose,” her narrative poetry, and her adaptations from the classical Chinese. It gives a fresh sense of the passion and energy of her work.

“I know no writer of English whose command of the rich vocabulary of sensuous impressions approaches Amy Lowell’s. The almost physical impact of it startles one each time one turns her pages.”

— John Livingston Lowes, Saturday Review of Literature

READ MORE