Amy Lowell is best remembered for bringing the Imagism of Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle to the attention of Americans, but her work has many facets. A flamboyant woman whose behavior belied her upbringing in a proper and prestigious New England family, she flouted convention with her proto-feminist poetry and unabashedly public persona.

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, Lowell was the last of five children; that her nearest sibling was twelve years older may have helped form her lifelong independence of will. The New England family, which traced its American ancestry to 1639, possessed vast wealth and was distinguished in education and the arts: Amy’s great-uncle, James Russell Lowell, was a leading nineteenth-century poet, her brother became President of Harvard, and a younger cousin, Robert Lowell, became a major poet after World War II.

Lowell was determined to go her own way from an early age; she attended school from age 10 to 17 only, studying instead in the home library and at the Boston Athenaeum. Her first book of poetry appeared in 1912; a year later, enraptured with H.D.’s Imagist verse in Poetry magazine, she traveled to London to meet the movement’s members. Her volume Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) clearly showed their influence, and when Pound moved on to other concerns she eagerly took up Imagism’s promotion and dissemination, prompting him to quip that it should now be known as “Amygism.”

Despite a glandular weight problem and fragile health, Lowell toured energetically in the next decade in the company of Ada Dwyer Russell, a former actress, and became a celebrity on the lecture circuit. Like H.D.’s, Lowell's best poetry glitters with color and features vivid, concise depictions of nature; lately interest in her life and work has revived and she is seen as an exemplary modern woman artist.