Icons: Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was a diva of poetic verse. She wrote more than 650 poems during her brief career, including some of the most vivid odes to lesbian love of her generation.

We're celebrating Pride Month with Icons: supreme queens of queer culture. Some are household names... others are a little more behind the scenes. All of them have defied social norms and influenced generations of people to be unapologetically themselves.

History classes can get a bad rap, and sometimes for good reason. When we were students, we couldn’t help wondering... where were all the ladies at? Why were so many incredible stories missing from the typical curriculum? Enter, Womanica. On this Wonder Media Network podcast we explore the lives of inspiring women in history you may not know about, but definitely should.

Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we’ll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know–but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Educators, Villains, Indigenous Storytellers, Activists, and many more.  Womanica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures. 

Womanica was created by Liz Kaplan and Jenny Kaplan, executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, and produced by Liz Smith, Grace Lynch, Maddy Foley, Brittany Martinez, Edie Allard, Lindsey Kratochwill, Adesuwa Agbonile, Carmen Borca-Carrillo, Taylor Williamson, Ale Tejeda, Sara Schleede, and Abbey Delk. Special thanks to Shira Atkins. 

Original theme music composed by Miles Moran.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello from Wonder Media Network. I'm Jenny Kaplan and this
is Wamanica. We're celebrating Pride Month with icons supreme queens
of queer culture. Some are household names, others are a
little more behind the scenes. All of these people have
defied social norms and influenced generations of people to be

(00:22):
unapologetically themselves. Today we're talking about a diva of poetic verse,
a performer as much as she was a poet. She
wrote more than six hundred and fifty poems during her
brief career, including some of the most vivid odes to
lesbian love of her generation. Let's talk about Amy Lowell.

(00:43):
Amy Lowell was born in eighteen seventy four to a
Boston Brahmin family, a shorthand term for New England elites.
Her grandfathers on both sides of the family helped build
the Massachusetts cotton mill industry, and Amy grew up at
the lap of luxury on a ten acre estate in Brookline, Massachusetts.

(01:06):
The youngest of five children, Amy was given a governess
and then sent to private school. She was described by
her teachers as well a terror. She didn't care what
the rules of the classroom were. She wasn't interested in
following any of them. At seventeen years old, she had

(01:27):
her debut into society. But for all the parties and
dinners and balls she attended that season, Amy drifted away
without a marriage proposal. Educating women was not a priority
for her family. College was out of the question, so
she set about educating herself, pulling from her estate's seven
thousand volume library. For a while, Amy lived the life

(01:52):
of an eccentric, unmarried woman with a lot of money.
She slept all day, woke up to attend the theater
at night, and then read and wrote until dawn. She'd
stride down the hallways of her mansion in a men's
shirt and giant pompadour, tiny glasses perched on the edge
of her nose, and a lit cigar hanging out of
her mouth. Amy's life was not unpleasant and was certainly busy,

(02:16):
but everything shifted One October night in nineteen o two,
Amy went to the theater, as she often did. The
actress Eleanora Dussa took the stage. Amy was entranced, inspired,
and a bit smitten. Amy went home and wrote her
a tribute and verse. Though later she'd criticize her first

(02:38):
work since childhood. Amy also wrote, it loosed a bolt
in my brain, and I found out where my true
function lay. At twenty eight years old, Amy became a poet.
In nineteen ten, Amy's first poems were published in The
Atlantic Monthly. Two years later, her first full book of
poems hit the shelves A Dome of many colored glass.

(03:01):
She was nearly forty years old. That same year, nineteen twelve,
Amy also met the love of her life, Ada Dwyer Russell.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Ada was an actress on tour in Boston.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
She'd been married, had a child, and then separated from
her husband. By nineteen fourteen, Aida had moved into Amy's mansion,
and for the rest of Amy's life, the two lived
in what was called a Boston marriage, a descriptor for
two women living together and reliant on no one but themselves.
Ada was Amy's great love, but poetry came in a

(03:37):
close second. Once Amy had started writing poetry, she was
determined to spread the gospel of Verse. God made me
a business woman, she said, and I made myself a poet.
Amy became particularly passionate about imagism, a new poetic movement
that valued simplicity, clarity, and precise language. Imagists aimed to

(03:57):
create concrete images, hence their name. For Amy, the visual
nature of imagism allowed her to write love poems to Ada,
disguised as poems about flowers. It allowed them to hide
in plain sight in the garden by midnight. For example,
she begins a black cat among roses, flocks lilac misted

(04:18):
under a first quarter moon, the sweet smells of heliotrope
and night scent at stock. The garden is very still.
It is dazed with moonlight, contented with perfume, dreaming the
opium dreams of its folded poppies. But not everyone was

(04:38):
thrilled with her prominent and influential role in the movement. T. S.
Eliot called her the demon saleswoman of modern poetry. As
Repound coined the term Amyism, implying that her crusades for
poetry were ego driven. Eventually, Amy moved on from her

(05:00):
focus on imagism. She began venturing into literary criticism, and
she started working on a massive biography of John Keats,
which bloomed into essentially a day to day account of
his life. The work was hard on Amy. Her eyesight
dwindled and she started suffering from hernia's. In the spring
of nineteen twenty five, Amy was in bed with a

(05:21):
particularly bad hernia attack. Never won to listen to orders,
she got out of bed anyways. She died from a
stroke a few hours later.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
She was just fifty one years old.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
In the subsequent decades, Amy's work was largely forgotten, but
as gender studies came to the forefront in the nineteen seventies,
Amy became known and celebrated as one of the most
elegant and explicit lesbian poets of the century. In her
short career, Amy published more than six hundred and fifty poems,
and a year after her death in nineteen twenty six,

(05:57):
Amy finally got the recognition she always knew you deserved,
the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
All month, We're talking about icons.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram at
Womanica Podcast special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister
and co creator.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
Talk to you tomorrow.