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Amy Lowells best poetry has the immediacy, spareness, and precision that she, Ezra Pound, and other Imagists advocated as a tonic to slack sentimentality and abstraction in verse. In the 1915 introduction to one of several anthologies she edited of Imagist poets, we find these principles: “to use the language of common speech,” “to create new rhythms,” “to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject,” “to present an image,” “to produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite/’ and, finally, to hold that “concentration is the very essence of poetry.” Much of Amy Lowell’s poetry did not live up to these aspirations, but Pound’s famous list of “Don’ts” also outstripped his actual poetic practice at the time. Still, Lowell and Pound, along with H. D. and other like-minded contemporaries, were revolutionizing poetry by promoting and working toward a crystalline, hard-edged aesthetic.
Born on February 9, 1874, in Brookline, Massachusetts, into a prominent New England family that would eventually spawn her distant cousin Robert Lowell, Amy Lowell first encountered Imagism when reading H. D. in a magazine. She soon set out to meet Pound and other Imagists in England in 1913, and she and Pound collaborated for a time. But jealousy over aesthetic and editorial leadership soon pitted them against one another, and Pound broke with the movement he had helped found. He famously denounced it as “Amygism” and denigrated the heavyset Lowell as a “hippopoetess.” In revolt against the constraints of her patrician heritage, Lowell—smoking cigars, wearing a pince-nez, bluntly dispensing opinions, and taking as her long-term companion the actress Ada Dwyer Russell—cut a striking figure as a liberated woman. As critic, prop¬agandist, anthologist, and patron, Lowell was a significant early promoter of modernist poetry. Like other Imagists, she found East Asian aesthetics congenial, eventually writ¬ing haiku poetry and other forms of what she called Chinoiserie.
If some of Lowell’s poetry is verbose and didactic, in contrast to the sharp focus and spare economy of means in the strongest Imagist work, a poem such as “The Pike” is vivid and compact. Like many of H. D.’s poems, many of Lowell’s are explicitly feminist in intention. In “Venus Transiens,” she vies with Botticelli’s famous painting of Venus, while slyly borrowing some of the painting’s energy to celebrate the beloved. Here and in the passionate poem “A Decade,” Lowell boldly expresses lesbian desire. Playing on the traditional association of the beloved with food and drink in “A Decade,” Lowell uses the senses of taste (sweet wine) and touch (smooth bread) to figure both sex and satiety. In poems such as “Shore Grass,” she captures textures of light, sound, and wind in cadenced language. While Lowell engages the senses in much of her early work, the late poem “New Heavens for Old” represents a sad, self-elegiac withdrawal from the adventurous styles of living and erotic expression she had once championed.

The Pike
In the brown water,
Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine,
Liquid and cool in the shade of the reeds,
A pike dozed.
Lost among the shadows of stems 5
He lay unnoticed.
Suddenly he flicked his tail,
And a green-and-copper brightness Ran under the water.
Out from under the reeds Came the olive-green light,
And orange flashed up Through the sun-thickened water. So the fish passed across the pool, Green and copper,
A darkness and a gleam,
And the blurred reflections of the willows on the opposite bank Received it.

Venus Transiens1 Tell me,
Was Venus more beautiful Than you are,
When she topped
The crinkled waves, 5
Drifting shoreward On her plaited shell?
Was Botticelli’s2 vision Fairer than mine;
And were the painted rosebuds 10
He tossed his lady,
Of better worth
Than the words I blow about you To cover your too great loveliness As with a gauze 15
Of misted silver?
For me,
You stand poised
In the blue and buoyant air,
Cinctured by bright winds, 20
Treading the sunlight.
And the waves which precede you
Ripple and stir
The sands at my feet.

1. Venus passing over (Latin). Venus is the Roman goddess of love and beauty.
2. 2. Italian artist Sandro Botticelli (1444—1510) painted The Birth of Venus, in which the goddess stands on a large scallop shell and small roses are blown about her.

Worshipping themselves.
They call for women and the women come,
They bare the whiteness of their lusts to the dead gaze of the old house- fronts,
They roar down the street like flame, 25
They explode upon the dead houses like new, sharp fire.
But I—
I arrange three roses in a Chinese vase:
A pink one,
A red one, 30
A yellow one.
I fuss over their arrangement.
Then I sit in a South window
And sip pale wine with a touch of hemlock4 in it,
And think of Winter nights, 35
And field-mice crossing and re-crossing The spot which will be my grave.

4. The poisonous potion by which the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates reportedly was executed.