Amy Lowell, American Modern (review)

This welcome collection of essays marks an important moment in modernist criticism. Since her death in 1925, Amy Lowell has been subjected to an almost systematic exclusion from literary consideration. Even the wave of feminist and queer criticism that has swept modernist studies in the last fifteen years has left her archive nearly untouched. Lowell's absence from the canon ostensibly stems from Ezra Pound's labeling her renovation of Imagism as "Amygism." The famous rivalry between Pound and Lowell is treated here as having "more to do with egos than with images" (xiii). In her lifetime, Lowell's best-selling volumes of poetry (she received a Pulitzer Prize in 1925), her entrepreneurial support of other writers, her dynamic lecture and reading tours, her prolific output of criticism and poetry, her "endless experiments" and "refusal to repeat herself" (xvii), all warrant more than the often "derisory" footnote she has been allocated (xii). This collection vigorously counteracts the homophobia and sexism as well as the deprecatory responses to Lowell's visceral presence that have characterized much criticism to date. Melissa Bradshaw, for instance, contends that Lowell's obesity disrupted gender expectations, "as fat female bodies evade easy classification, destabilize categories, invite paradox" (179).

The editorial challenge of Amy Lowell, American Modern is thus to "begin in earnest a critical reevaluation, to build a solid critical basis for evaluating her poetry, her criticism, her politics, her influences, and her influence" (xviii). Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw, who have also edited a companion Selected Poems, showcase essays that traverse this panoramic range of concerns. Although the editors maintain that they omitted from the Selected Poems many of Lowell's narrative poems that may "present an important gender critique, but do so in a context of excessive melodrama, and at times even gratuitous violence and bloodshed" (xvi), this volume of essays is not similarly framed. I was glad to find "The Basket" (among poems singled out as "gratuitous") treated as an instance of "gothic heterosexuality" in Jaime Hovey's insightful essay on Lowell's appropriation of "courtly love" to offer "a model for lesbian modernists of lovers who could not marry" and whose "satisfaction was delayed, derailed, or denied" (81).

Taken as a whole, the essays successfully represent Lowell as multi-dimensional. Jayne Marek emphasizes the poet's goal "to launch imagism in a fresh way" (155). Oddly, one of Lowell's major "offenses" was her "democratic" sensibility. In her relentless "marketing" of imagism as a "group" venture, Marek explains, she sought "to create a public which shall no longer be bound by the Victorian tradition" (156). Rather than focus on Lowell's poetry, Paul Lauter speculates about the "virtual absence of discussion" of "the considerable body of her critical writing," concluding that what has "so menaced" her critics is her insistent "boundary-dissolving qualities" (4). Playing up yet another facet, Margaret Homans discusses Lowell's two-volume biography of Keats. Lowell's study not only recasts Keats as Imagist poet, underscoring his favoring the decorative over the allegorical, but also willfully misreads her predecessor's annotations to use in her own poems.

As did other female modernists, Lowell struggled to "make it new" while exploring gender and sexuality. As several essays amplify, Lowell strove, as Munich argues, to reconcile "a body life and a mind life" (12). Lillian Faderman's essay, pivoting upon Lowell's long-term relationship to Ada Dwyer Russell, argues that the poet's narrative poems use "illicit heterosexuality" to explore lesbian desire, while many of her lyric poems "deal more directly with her passionate interest in another woman" (66). The close scrutiny of poems provided here is one of the most compelling components of reclaiming Lowell, who has been too readily dismissed on stylistic grounds.

The volume depicts Lowell as a "breakthrough" writer in her efforts to make "modernism" more widely legible while cultivating aesthetic freshness. With incisive verve, Andrew Thacker (applying Bakhtin's theories) examines Lowell's inventive use of "polyphonic prose" to...