Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight comes from one of the most prominent families in Massachusetts, becoming a poet as an adult. Her writing and her life was nearly forgotten until gender studies classes began looking at women like her as example of early lesbianism. She had written what is considered by many some to be included in the collection of the most romantic poetry written. Today's Out Spotlight is Amy Lowell and her love and inspiration Ada Dwyer Russell.

Amy Lawrence Lowell was born into the prominent Lowell family in Brookline Massachusetts in 1874. Her paternal grandfather, John Amory Lowell, developed the cotton industry of Massachusetts with her maternal grandfather, Abbott Lawrence. The towns of Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, are named for the families. Her grandfather Lowell's cousin was the poet James Russell Lowell.

The youngest of five, there was much success in the Lowell household. Her eldest brother, Percival, became an astronomer in his late 30's discovered the "canals" of Mars and founded Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona as well as writing two books inspired by travels to Japan and Asia. Her other brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, became president of Harvard University.

The family home was called "Sevenels" for the "Seven L's" or Lowells. Educated by an English governess at home until the age of nine, she was sent to a series of private schools. Lowell was far from a model student growing up. During vacations and summers, she traveled with her family to Europe and to the western United States.

In 1891, as a proper young lady from a wealthy family, she had her debut. She was invited to numerous parties, but did not get the marriage proposal that the year was supposed to produce. While a university education was out of the question for a Lowell daughter, as opposed to her brothers, sheset about educating herself, reading from the 7,000 volume library of her father and also taking advantage of the Boston Athenaeum.

She lived the life of a wealthy socialite and began a lifelong love of book collecting. Six years after her social coming out, at the age of 23 she accepted a marriage proposal, but her fiance changed his mind, marrying another woman . Lowell went to Europe and Egypt in 1897-98 to recover, living on a severe diet that was supposed to improve her health and help with an increasing weight problem. Instead, the diet nearly ruined her health.

In 1900, after her parents had both died, she bought the family home, Sevenels. Her life as a socialite continued, with parties and entertaining. She also took up the civic involvement of her father, especially in supporting education and libraries.

She had always enjoyed writing, but her efforts at writing plays didn't meet with her own satisfaction. Fascinated by the theater, she attended many performance at the numerous theaters in Boston at the time. In 1893 and 1896, she had seen performances by the actress Eleanora Duse, in 1902, after seeing Duse on another tour in Europe, she went home and wrote a tribute to her in blank verse -- and, as she later said, "I found out where my true function lay." She became a poet -- or, as she also later said, "made myself a poet."

By 1910, her first poem was published in Atlantic Monthly, and three others were accepted there for publication. In 1912, the year that also saw the first books published by Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, she published her first collection of poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass.

It was in 1909 that Amy Lowell met actress Ada Dwyer Russell. Russell was born in 1863m raised a Mormon, she became a theatrical actress preforming on Broadway and in London's West End. She married Harold Russell in 1893 but entered a life long separation a few years after their marriage. The couple never sought divorce.

From about 1914 on, Russell, a widow who was 11 years older than Lowell, became Amy's traveling and living companion and secretary. 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. Lowell has been linked romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence of any contact between them is a brief correspondence about a planned memorial for Duse. They lived together in a "Boston marriage". "Boston Marriage" was a New England colloquialism in the decades between the late 19th and early 20th century to describe two women living together, independent of financial support from a man. The assumption that in the era when the term was in use, it denoted a lesbian relationship. However, there is no documented proof that any particular "Boston marriage" included sexual relations.

In 1913 Lowell returned to England again to summer, this time bringing her maroon auto and maroon-coated chauffeur, part of her eccentric persona. She returned to America just as World War I began, having sent that maroon auto on ahead of her.

The following year, she published her second book of poetry, Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds. Many of the poems were in vers libre (free verse), which she renamed "unrhymed cadence." A few were in a form she invented, which she called "polyphonic prose."

In 1915, Lowell published an anthology of Imagist verse, followed by new volumes in 1916 and 1917. Her own lecture tours began in 1915, as she talked of poetry and also read her own works. She was a popular speaker, often speaking to overflow crowds. Perhaps the novelty of the Imagist poetry drew people; perhaps they were drawn to the performances in part because she was a Lowell; in part her reputation for eccentricities helped bring in the people.

Lowell was quite different than most of the the socialite ladies of the time. She dressed in severe suits and men's shirts. She wore pince nez glasses that clipped on her nose and had her hair done usually by Ada, in a pompadour that added a bit of height to her five feet. She slept on a custom-made bed with exactly sixteen pillows. She kept sheepdogs, until World War I's meat rationing made her give them up and gave guests towels to put in their laps to protect them from her dogs' drools. She draped mirrors and stopped clocks. And, perhaps most famously, she smoked cigars, which she claimed were less distracting to her work than cigarettes, because they lasted longer. She preferred sleeping until three in the afternoon and working through the night. She also struggled with her weight and a glandular condition was which caused her to continue to gain. (Ezra Pound called her "hippopoetess.") She was operated on several times for persistent hernia problems.

In 1915, she also ventured into literary criticism with Six French Poets, featuring Symbolist poets little known in America. In 1916, she published another volume of her own verse, Men, Women and Ghosts. A book derived from her lectures, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry followed in 1917, then another poetry collection in 1918, Can Grande's Castle and Pictures of the Floating World in 1919 and adaptations of myths and legends in 1921 in Legends.

During an illness in 1922 she wrote and published A Critical Fable - anonymously. For some months she denied that she'd written it. Her relative, James Russell Lowell, had published in his generation A Fable for Critics, witty and pointed verse analyzing poets who were his contemporaries. Amy Lowell's A Critical Fable likewise skewered her own poetic contemporaries.

She then began on a massive biography of John Keats, whose works she'd been collecting since 1905. Almost a day-by-day account of his life, the book also recognized Fanny Brawne for the first time as a positive influence on him.
The work was taxing on her health, nearly ruining her eyesight. Additionally her hernias continued to cause her trouble. In May of 1925, she was advised to remain in bed with a troublesome hernia, not following doctor's orders she ceased her bedrest. On May 12 she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 51. The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock. That collection included the patriotic poem "Lilacs".

Ada, named by her as executrix her estate, not only burned all personal correspondence, as directed by Lowell, but also published three more volumes of Lowell's poems posthumously. These included some late sonnets to Eleanora Duse, who had died in 1912 herself, and other poems considered too controversial for Lowell to publish during her lifetime. Lowell left her fortune and Sevenels in trust to Ada. Ada survived Amy by 27 years, passing in 1952.

"Lillian Faderman and others rediscovered Amy Lowell as an example of poets and others whose same-sex relationships had been important to them in their lives, but who had -- for obvious social reasons -- not been explicit and open about those relationships. Faderman and others re-examined poems like "Clear, With Light Variable Winds" or "Venus Transiens" or "Taxi" or "A Lady" and found the theme -- barely concealed -- of the love of women." Ada was 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. "A Decade," which was written as a celebration of the ten year anniversary of Ada and Amy's relationship, and the "Two Speak Together" section of Pictures of the Floating World was recognized for the love poetry that it is.

The theme was not completely concealed to those who knew the couple well. John Livingston Lowes, a friend Lowell's, had recognized Ada as the object of one of her poems, and Lowell wrote back to him, "I am very glad indeed that you liked 'Madonna of the Evening Flowers.' How could so exact a portrait remain unrecognized?

And so, too, the portrait of the committed relationship and love of Amy Lowell and Ada Dwyer Russell was largely unrecognized until recently."




A Decade

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.



The Taxi

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?


A Gift

See! I give myself to you, Beloved!
My words are little jars
For you to take and put upon a shelf.
Their shapes are quaint and beautiful,
And they have many pleasant colours and lustres
To recommend them.
Also the scent from them fills the room
With sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses.

When I shall have given you the last one,
You will have the whole of me,
But I shall be dead.