Amy Lowell Influences

How did Amy Lowell shape contemporary trends in american poetry? A quote of Amy Lowell shows both her determined personality and her sense of humor: "God made me a business woman, and I made myself a poet." During her career that spanned only twelve or so years, she wrote and published over 650 poems, but she is most often recognized for her work to open American readers up to contemporary trends in poetry. "Poet, propagandist, lecturer, translator, biographer, critic . . . her verve is almost as remarkable as her verse," stated poet Louis Untermeyer in his 1923 work American Poetry since 1900. “A collection of Lowell's work was published in What's O'Clock?, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.”(Poetry foundation) On February 9, 1874, Amy Lowell was born at Sevenels, a ten-acre family estate in Brookline, Massachusetts. Her family was of old New England and at the top of Boston society. Lowell was the youngest of five children. Her older brother Abbott Lawrence, a freshman at Harvard when she was born went on to become president of Harvard College. As a child she was first tutored at home, then attended private schools in Boston, during which time she made several trips to Europe with her family. At …show more content…
It is, in common with all of Miss Lowell’s work, best in its portrayal of colors and sounds, of physical perceptions rather than the reactions of emotional experience. She is the poet of the external world, her visual effects are as "hard and clear" as the most uncompromising Imagist could desire. 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. Motion frequently takes the place of