Amy Lowell, Diva Poet (review)

I was excited to discover this book, an illuminating and multi-faceted collection of essays that are, in many ways, a follow-up to two earlier books that Bradshaw co-edited with Adrienne Munich for Rutgers University Press: Amy Lowell’s Selected Poems,¹ which appeared in 2002, and a selection of critical essays on Lowell that appeared in 2004.² There is much to admire in Bradshaw’s monograph: its quick-paced distillation of multiple biographies of Lowell, her intimate, evocative record of Lowell’s turbulent rise and decline. Yet Bradshaw’s central assessment of Lowell as a diva, while suggestive, allows the critic to skirt the question of her poetic contribution. Bradshaw claims that the book is, in part, a form of “reclamation.” As such, it does not offer new readings of poems after decades of neglect or bashing. Bradshaw is not shy of first-person, but in the book’s five chapters there is no mention of her own critical sense of the work. As a whole, the book is bold, takes a poet whose very name makes academics bristle and whose works are prime for re-evaluation. At the same time, the study remains embroiled in the very history of misogyny and homophobia that has encumbered Lowell up to this point. It certainly calls these twin demons out, but devotes the majority of its pages to the cultural mechanisms by which Lowell became the object of such mixed attraction, disdain, or outright hate.

The book is more rightly appreciated as belonging to cultural studies, an examination of the forces that shaped the phenomenon Amy Lowell, who, Bradshaw argues, made “a career” not as a poet but as a “celebrity” where “the persona she created also served as the single most effective weapon her critics used to destroy her artistic reputation in the years following her death” (3). The most damning insults came from Pound, who called her “Amy-just-selling-the-goods” and Eliot, who labeled her “the demon saleswoman.” Whether or not these remarks emerge from the poets’ sense of being “threatened by her celebrity,” such condemnatory remarks are nicely catalogued but rarely deflated by Bradshaw in Diva Poet. Instead, Lowell is simply an excellent “foil” for Pound’s own use of the marketplace.

Bradshaw theorizes that there is “a pattern of fashionable adoration and devaluation we recognize as part of the continuing cultural phenomenon of the diva. This devaluation is not particular to Lowell, but rather a predictable part of female celebrity” (3–4). The strength of this astute observation is also its weakness. In spite of her disappearance from the canon, Lowell as diva poet “continued to matter to female and queer, particularly lesbian, readers” (4). To consider Lowell primarily as a diva overshadows other possibilities of viewing her as a lesbian poet who defied her culture and upbringing to write about homoerotic desire in a personal manner that is sensuous and fairly transparent.

By overstating Lowell as a celebrity, Bradshaw stops short of claiming Lowell as a poet. Didn’t Lowell, after all, spend her nights writing poems as well as an impressive biography of Keats? Diva Poet, in its attempt to provide a novel take, sidesteps this possibility. Further, can we really take the poet’s “self-conscious eccentricities” (17) as active participation in creating her own celebrity? I find it hard to imagine someone cloaking all the mirrors in her house, purportedly so as not to have to see her over-sized body, as a ruse with which to draw greater attention her body—yet Bradshaw imagines just this. Lowell was evidently painfully aware of her weight and, as Bradshaw notes, made efforts to combat what seemed to be a “glandular problem.” In portraying Lowell as diva, Bradshaw comments: “Take, for example, the role Lowell’s cigars play in her formal dinner parties, and her infamous after-dinner salon, the scene of many conversations critical to the development of a modern American poetics” (19). This assertion taunts us with Lowell’s “critical” contribution to...