Amy Lowell

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1874, Amy Lowell came from the prominent Lowell family but made her own place in literature through force of personality and a distinctive poetic voice. She became one of the best-known American champions of Imagism, a movement that favored precise language, strong visual images, and musical freedom over traditional poetic ornament.

Lowell was not only a poet but also an energetic promoter of new writing. She published many volumes of poetry, wrote criticism, and lectured widely, helping bring modern poetry to a broader public in the United States and abroad. Her interests were wide-ranging, and her poems move easily from vivid nature writing to dramatic monologues, love poems, and experiments with rhythm sometimes called "polyphonic prose."

She died in 1925, and her reputation was strengthened soon after when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926 for What's O'Clock. Today she is remembered as a central figure in early twentieth-century American poetry and as a writer who helped open the door to newer, more flexible ways of writing verse.