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I began thinking about Amy Lowell in connection with a book I have been writing on the construction of cultural authority, and particularly academic cultural authority, in the 1920s and thereafter. The hegemony of New Critical and Cold War cultural paradigms in which I had been trained in the 1950s at Indiana and Yale had long troubled me, even as I had to acknowledge their continuing power. Work on the book led me to ask what alternatives had been in the field when Eliot, Pound, and their academic successors developed the literary canon I had initially learned and shaped accounts of literary history and poetic value so determinative of later pedagogical and critical practice. Since history, including cultural history, is, if not written by the winners, certainly written about them, it is easy to forget the conflicted nature of social and cultural change. Yet any historical moment, looked at closely, will display a contest for authority, among differing-and generally antagonistic -parties. The problem is to unearth those accounted as "losers" from the cultural debris heaped upon them by their opponents.
I followed Cary Nelson's proposal that, to know the real character of a culture, one should look most closely at what it scorns.1 Apart from the workingclass writers in whom I had long been interested, I was quickly drawn to writers of the New Negro Renaissance, marginalized in ways even a political activist like me found remarkable, and, odd choice at first glance, to Amy Lowell. What was striking to me as I read about her (to the extent that there was anything useful to read) was the degree to which she had been and continued to be marginalized, even in the midst of a feminist revival. And, she was, moreover, the subject of a degree of vituperative comment that made some of the attacks on Kate Millett's Sexual Politics seem mild.
To fill out the first point with a few statistics: in the last twenty-five years, according to the MLA Bibliography, about 28 books and articles devoted to Lowell have been published. By way of comparison, 33 have been devoted to Nella Larsen, 44 each to Louise Bogan and Edna St. Vincent Millay, 112 to Djuna Barnes, 202 to Zora Neale Hurston, 318 each to H.D. and Marianne Moore. The champion, with a score of 426, is Gertrude Stein. Champion among the women, to be sure. Eliot's total of books and articles is 522-with many more in earlier decades-and the indefatigable Pound's an amazing 2,063. The figures register what we are mostly familiar with: that interest in Lowell declined sharply after her death in 1925 and that writers like Pound and Eliot, and even Stein and H.D., preoccupy the academics most likely to produce books and articles on literary subjects.
Indeed, the figures alone really do not tell us much that we did not know. The character of the writing about Lowell is much more indicative. By writing, I mean not only chapters, articles, or substantial units devoted to her work, but brief comments as well, a sentence or phrase here, a nasty crack there. For Lowell often provides an object of derision against which the virtues of other writers, especially male modernists like Pound, are constructed. In fact, I began to find it puzzling that critics should devote all the energy it takes to write a book to a person many of them seemed altogether to despise. Immediately after Lowell's death, for example, Clement Wood prepared a volume on her which attacks her poetry as, in its nature, an expression of her perverse desires.
More characteristically, perhaps, Horace Gregory in 1958 published a twohundred- page volume that concludes that Lowell was an "archetypical American clubwoman," a circus barker for poetry, a Leigh Hunt of her time. But, he writes, "one should not conclude that the 'barker' because of his activity is a poet." Similarly, a decade later Cudworth Flint concludes his Minnesota pamphlet with, "She cannot be left out of any history of American poetry of her time" any more than the stage manager of a new company could be absent from its performance of Hamlet. The operative tone of much of the writing on Lowell between her death and the last few years is represented by the questions posed in Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska: "Was she a great poet? Was Amy Lowell a poet at all?" They go on to answer their questions, in the negative, by quoting Winfield Townley Scott: "Her poems are the work of a woman who would have shown as extraordinary in any career; they are, even at their most expert, remarkable in the very light of their weakness, for Amy Lowell was not a poet at all."
More and more it came to seem to me that Lowell was peculiarly threatening to many of her critics, less personally engaged with her than the vituperative Pound had been. I wondered what it was in Lowell that so menaced, even at distances of a quarter century and more. I will return to this question shortly. To be sure, there was much about Lowell's background and manner to antagonize opponents. From one of New England's most prominent and wealthy families, she lived much of her life in the family's Brookline mansion, Sevenels. Shy, overweight, and preferring the avocations of boys, she disliked schools, spending as little time as she could trapped in them. With her father's death in 1900, she came into possession of Sevenels, a prominent social position, and more money, but little sense of vocation. Sometime during the first decade of the century, however, she began to chart out a course for herself as a literary figure, and toward that goal she applied her talents, prodigious energy, and funds.
She wrote poetry extensively (eleven books in fifteen years), including her funny and controversial take on her peers, A Critical Fable (1922). She also collected volumes and manuscripts of Keats; she was ultimately to publish an impressive two-volume study of the poet. She sought out the young movers and shakers of the new renaissance in American poetry and organized a number of them into imagist collections and other poetic ventures, read widely to great response (favorable and otherwise) at poetry societies and colleges across the country, and entered into well-publicized cultural brawls with poetry traditionalists as well as with figures like Pound. In 1914, she also persuaded Ada Dwyer Russell to share her life at Sevenels, where they were able to build a certain sanctuary within a life of activity and contest. In ill health, to which her obesity contributed, through much of the last eight years of her life, Lowell died just after the Keats book was published in 1925, at age fifty-one.
In reading Lowell and her adversaries I was struck by the discrepancy between the considerable body of her critical writing and the virtual absence of discussion of it, even by commentators willing to examine her poetry. Gay Wilson Allen (later to be known as the biographer of Whitman) devoted considerable space to Lowell (and none to Pound, incidentally) in his 1935 book on American Prosody, but few have followed his lead and, so far as I know, none of Lowell's prose works has been in print for over thirty years. I was reminded of the question: "What counts as theory?" For Lowell's critical work provides an interesting contrast to that of Eliot and Pound. Pound, it has seemed to me, is filled with negative prescriptions, poetic "don'ts," which is what he entitled a brief manifesto of the imagist period. While he was obviously a significant force in encouraging and teaching some younger poets, and in editing Eliot, he somehow always evokes for me Blake's line from ''The Garden of Love" about "binding with briars my joys & desires." He is concerned to differentiate the modern from the Victorian, the hard-edged from the "sentimental," the discipline of rhyme from the "prose kinema"-in short, to establish and ardently to police borders. Eliot, too, takes on such roles. His canon-establishing essay "The Metaphysical Poets" is primarily concerned to trace the trite "main current" of English poetry, from the Elizabethan dramatists, through the Metaphysical poets, and, by way of certain French symbolistes, to the high modernism of . . . well, himself. And thus to distinguish the legitimate line of succession from the false alternatives of Milton and Dryden and, more particularly, from the dissipating ruminations of his Romantic predecessors. Eliot's project, after all, was not simply to validate tradition over against the lure of personal expressiveness, but to establish a particular tradition as central to what is nowadays talked about as "western civilization."
By contrast, Lowell's theoretical work, including the "Manifesto" she and Richard Aldington prepared for the first imagist collection she gathered, is more eclectic, inclusive, perhaps unsystematic. Some have seen it as theoretically sloppy, even contradictory. Certainly Lowell's practice, as Flint, among others, points out, seems full of contradictions. While, for example, she proclaimed herself an Imagist, beginning with objects and suggesting significance for them, she as often practiced a form of symbolism, beginning with subjective states or "a significance" and finding images to express them.