“At the Mercy of Editorial Selection”: Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and the Imagist Anthologies

Even though at the height of her career she was a celebrated poet and central authority in the field modern verse, throughout much of the twentieth century Amy Lowell has been known simply as the woman who stole control of the quintessential school of modern poetry — Imagism — from the movement’s founder, Ezra Pound. Analyzing the exploding market for and controversial role of poetry anthologies in the modernist period, I show that the struggle between Pound and Lowell was more than a simple personality conflict. It was truly a battle over the central question of what modernism ought to be: in Pound’s estimation, a small and hierarchized sliver of literary elite vying for central control over literary production and its audience or, in Lowell’s project, a collective approach to literature in which authors work collaboratively to generate widespread popularity for modernist poetry.