Men, Women and Ghosts

by Amy Lowell

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories

141 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1916

About the author

A leader of the imagists, American poet Amy Lawrence Lowell wrote several volumes, including Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914).

A mother bore Amy into a prominent family. Percival Lowell, her brother and a famous astronomer, predicted the existence of the dwarf planet Pluto; Abbott Lawrence Lowell, another brother, served as president of Harvard University.

The Lowell family deemed not proper attendance at college for a woman, who instead compensated with her avid reading to nearly obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and traveled widely; a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe inspired her, who afterward turned in 1902. In 1910, Atlantic Monthly first published her work.

She published A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass , apparently first collection, in 1912. In 1912, rumors swirled that supposedly lesbian Lowell reputedly lusted for actress Ada Dwyer Russell, her patron. Her more erotic work subjected Russell. The two women traveled together to England, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, a major influence at once and a major critic of her work. Mercedes de Acosta romantically linked Lowell despite the brief correspondence about a memorial for Duse that never took place, the only evidence that they knew each other.

Lowell, an imposing figure, kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez. She smoked constantly and claimed that cigars lasted longer than cigarettes. A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that Witter Bynner once called her a "hippopoetess," and Ezra Pound repeated this cruel comment. Her works also criticized French literature, and she penned a biography of John Keats.

People well record fetish of Lowell for Keats. Pound thought merely of a rich woman, who ably assisted financially the publication and afterwards made "exile" towards vorticism. Lowell early adhered to the "free verse" method.

Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 51 years. In the following year of 1926, people awarded her the posthumous Pulitzer Prize for What's O'Clock . People forgot her works for years, but focus on lesbian themes, collection of love, addressed to Ada Dwyer Russell, and personification of inanimate objects, such as in The Green Bowl , The Red Lacquer Music Stand , and Patterns caused a resurgence of interest.

Reviews

[Patch]

i liked it more than the other book I read by her. I wished there was less men and women and more ghosts. a lot of other reviews complain it leans too narrative, but I like the ambiguity that creates. The onomatopoeia was a bit annoying but I think it might have been because I was listening to the audiobook version. the anti-war stuff was unexpected but good and surprisingly dark at times.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imagist poetry, or "polyphonic prose" as Lowell herself rather grandly termed her own versification.

"Poly-whatnot prose" perhaps, for I'm not sure this is even poetry at all for the most part.

The imagist school was founded by Ezra Pound but later defined by Lowell. Simple speech is favoured over lyricism, freedom of rhythm over the metrical, clarity over opacity. The fancy term for prose where anything goes sounds good, but is it?

The trouble is if you take all the lyricism and ambiguity out of poetry then you also run the risk of taking all the interest out of it. These 'poems' are ok as stories or monologues, but I can't recall a single line that struck me as memorable from a poetic standpoint.

Figurines in Old Saxe are three lengthy poems where various wives are tempted by the attentions of a lover while their husband's are elsewhere, either away at war or engrossed in their work like the court musician of 'The Cremona Violin.' All were interesting enough in themselves but shorn of lyricism they were also short of anything special.

Bronze Tablets, four pieces touching on Napoleon, were a little more imaginative. The best was 'The Hammers' which told the story of his fall through carpentry, from the making of the English ships to the making of his coffin.

War Pictures were the weakest set, surprising considering WWI was in full force at the time. If the prose is so free why did Lowell feel compelled to keep rhyming the last word of a sentence with an early word in the next sentence?

The Overgrown Pasture, dramatic monologues in colloquial speech again hardly registered as poetry at all. 'Off the Turnpike' did at least feature a disembodied hand and made me laugh. 'Number 3 on the Docket' was narrated by a wife who murdered her husband
'because o' th' silence.
The long, long silence,
That watched all around me,
And he wouldn't break it.'

Clocks Tick a Century were mixed pieces with more overt humour. I can't fault her verve throughout, but it takes more than confidence with what you're writing to make a poet. In 'Stravinsky's Three Pieces "Grotesques", for String Quartet' she even attempted to convert the conductor's music into poetry:

Thin-voiced, nasal pipes
Drawing sound out and out
Until it is a screeching thread,
Sharp and cutting, sharp and cutting,
It hurts.
Whee-e-e!
Bump! Bump! Tong-ti-bump!

Um...

[Michael P.]

The first narrative poem was great, but I did not find the second in the least engaging. I read 10% of the third and was not engaged again. It was the story of another unhappy woman. Did I want to slog through that? No. Did I want to risk the subsequent poems being about other unhappy women. I did not. Moving on to Boris Pasternack.

[Janette Schafer · Rating 3 out of 5]

An important poet

I appreciate her late poetry better. Many of these are long epic poems which I don't appreciate as much due to personal preference.

[Susan Molloy · Rating 3 out of 5]

✔️Published in 1916.
Although this book was well-written by one of my favorite authoresses, Amy Lowell, this work did not inspire me too much.

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