Born: 9 February 1874, United States
Died: 12 May 1925
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Amy Lowell, an American poet and critic, sister of President Lowell of Harvard University. In 1912 she published a small book of poems – A dome of Many-Coloured Glass, and this was followed by three other slender volumes of verse – Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds and Men, Women and Ghosts. She also wrote two critical works – Tendencies in Modern American Poetry and Six French Poets, and a book of prose poems entitled Can Grande’s Castle, which appeared in 1917.
Her work as a poet and critic has given her a distinguished position among American writers, and she won high praise from some of the discerning literary minds of her time.
Her last work, published a short time before her death, was a two-volume biography of John Keats, her favorite poet, in which she gave a sympathetic and tender picture of Keats’ sweetheart, Fanny Brawne. Miss Lowell never married, but she was no advocate of a career for women at the sacrifice of marriage and family life.
IW note: After her death in 1925, Lowell won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for What’s O’Clock. Her partner, Ada Dwyer Russell, was the subject of many of her romantic poems, which have been called the most explicit and elegant lesbian love poetry from the period between Sappho and poets of the 1970s.