Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 – May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
Lowell was born into Brookline's prominent Lowell family, sister to astronomer Percival Lowell and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell.
She never attended college because her family did not consider that
proper for a woman, but she compensated with avid reading and
near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe.
Lowell was said to be lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell
were reputed to be lovers. Russell is reputed to be 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. 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.
Pound considered her embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hi-jacking of
the movement, and among his friends he referred to her as the
"hippo-poetess". 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. Lowell was a short but
imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez. She smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that poet Witter Bynner
once said, in a cruel comment repeated by Ezra Pound and thereafter
commonly misattributed to him, that she was a "hippopoetess."
Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925 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", which Louis Untermeyer said was the poem of hers he liked best.