Amy Lowell (1874–1925)

Amy Lawrence Lowell was born into a wealthy and prominent New England family in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was a sister of the astronomer Percival Lowell, the legal scholar Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who became president of Harvard, and political activist and philanthropist Elizabeth Lowell Putnam. She was educated at home by a governess and at private schools in Boston, read widely, and travelled extensively in Europe with her family. She was considered an outspoken, eccentric and unusual personality. The Dictionary of Literary Biography called Amy Lowell "the embodiment of the new liberated woman," citing her "unlimited faith in her own capability." Her first independent work, the poem "Fixed Idea" was published in The Atlantic magazine in 1910. She campaigned for the success of Imagist poetry in America and embraced its principles in her own work. She acted as a publicity agent for the movement, editing and contributing to an anthology of Imagist poets in 1915. With the deaths of her parents prior to World War I, she purchased the 10-acre family estate Sevenals, where she had been born, and where she lived the rest of her life. Amy Lowell wrote a biography of the British poet John Keats, a lifelong love, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously in 1926 for her collection "What's O'Clock." She died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 51.