Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell (1874-1925), American poet and critic, one of the leaders of the imagist school (see Imagism). Amy Lawrence Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and was the sister of astronomer Percival Lowell and Harvard University President Abbott Lawrence Lowell. She traveled widely, lectured on poetry, and edited three imagist anthologies. As an imagist she championed free verse, tight precision in vocabulary, and concise style. Her volumes of verse include Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds (1914); Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916), which contains her well-known poem “Patterns”; Pictures of the Floating World (1919); What's O'Clock (1925), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926; and Ballads for Sale (1927). Among her critical works are Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917) and the biography John Keats (1925).