Quotes and anectdotes from the wise to the foolish, and the courageous to the drunk

Amy Lowell Poet

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: Feb 9, 1874
  • Died: May 12, 1925

Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 - May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

Lowell was born into Brookline's prominent Lowell family, sister to astronomer Percival Lowell and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell.

She never attended college because her family did not consider that proper for a woman, but she compensated with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe.

Lowell was said to be lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell were reputed to be lovers. Russell is reputed to be the subject of her more erotic work, most notably the love poems contained in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection of Pictures of the Floating World. The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Pound considered her embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hi-jacking of the movement, and among his friends he referred to her as the "hippo-poetess".

Happiness, to some, elation Is, to others, mere stagnation. happiness

All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words. dreams

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. art

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern. science

Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils. dreams