Amy Lowell - Penumbra

Bio and the Dawning of Amygism

In Brookline, Massachusetts, Amy Lowell was born into a family of Boston aristocracy at the family estate Sevenels. She began acquiring books almost obsessively after she was given one on learning how to read by her mother as a child, which would continue on until the end of her days. In and out of private schools in Brookline and Boston and regarded as a “terror” to other students and teachers as she went about progressing in her studies, Lowell lived the life of a spoiled child from a wealthy background, learning what her family wanted her to study. She was tutored in standard subjects for a girl her status like English, History, French, Literature and Italian. Despite (and perhaps due to) the fact her family didn’t think it was proper for a woman to enroll in university she decided to instruct herself by reading from her father’s 7000 book collection. In 1902, at the age of twenty-eight, her fondness for reading blossomed further into her life ambition of becoming a poet after she read Imagination and Fancy by Leigh Hunt, opening a “door that might otherwise have remained shut” according to Lowell herself, and the poem which she first wrote “contained every cliché and error a poem could have”, which “loosed a bolt in her brain, dawning on her where her true function lay”. 

Lowell began her publication streak with books of poetry such as A Fixed Idea and A Dome of Many-Colored Glass, which received little to no attention and matching review criticism. 1913 was the year when the elucidating clash between Lowell and imagism was struck after she came across a poem signed by H.D. “Imagiste”, who had significant influence on the literary material that went on to be baptized as the Imagist movement, having reached widespread recognition (although with little praise) under Pound. The reciprocity felt by Lowell between her and this poetic style was immediate and she had gained instant interest in following it. 

She had met Ezra Pound in a poets meeting in London and they were very much involved with one another’s tastes and personal directions in literature, however they fell out of each other’s favour in regards to the imagist movement, as Lowell took an enthusiastic and innovative approach and admiration toward it that seems to have “scared” Pound away, or at least causing some repulse, which led to the renaming of Imagism to Amygism by the father of the movement as Vorticism became his new technical approach to writing. Amy would go on to say in a letter that “Pound has ruined everything that he has touched”, as she took the reigns of Imagism as a new style of writing, injecting into it her own flair and what would become her signature writing, “polyphonic prose” and free verse melded together through the main idea of the movement still, which was the “hard and clear” (as Louis Untermeyer put it) treatment of the objects by the poetic persona, a transparent plethora of painstakingly chosen adjectives and metaphors that would leave out any doubts of the meaning behind the words. In essence, swinging between the literal, almost non-lyrical description of events witnessed by the poetic subject so as to provide the descriptive transparency and adding onto it the creative (herein lying the Art) personality of the poet. In this sense, Lowell had managed to create a style exclusive to her, which gifted her with a rapid rise to fame at that time. She had become a lyrical storyteller of sorts, completely detached from Pound’s stiffer limitations. She was the first woman poet to consider herself as part of the female literary descendants, seeing the need to provide for such a concept opposite an indestructible track record literary canon of dominant male writers that inherited the merit of the History of literature up until that time. Awarded with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for poetry for What’s O’Clock in 1925.

-edited October 23rd

Penumbra

The poem below is the one we will focus on on Monday. Try to give it your own personal understanding of it bearing in mind the general Imagist principles developed by Lowell (derived from Pound’s archaic version), which is to treat it as a flexible account and description of something that is conveyed through the creative lens of the poet. See it as storytelling converted to verse, being something which is not hard to read, but nontheless gives ample space to a wide array of interpretations.

P.S. Apologies for the delay in posting something due on Thursday.

André & Luís

As I sit here in the quiet Summer night,

Suddenly, from the distant road, there comes

The grind and rush of an electric car.

And, from still farther off,

An engine puffs sharply,

Followed by the drawn-out shunting scrape of a freight train.   

These are the sounds that men make

In the long business of living.

They will always make such sounds,

Years after I am dead and cannot hear them.

Sitting here in the Summer night,

I think of my death.

What will it be like for you then?

You will see my chair

With its bright chintz covering

Standing in the afternoon sunshine,

As now.

You will see my narrow table

At which I have written so many hours.

My dogs will push their noses into your hand,   

And ask—ask—

Clinging to you with puzzled eyes.

The old house will still be here,

The old house which has known me since the beginning.   

The walls which have watched me while I played:   

Soldiers, marbles, paper-dolls,

Which have protected me and my books.

The front-door will gaze down among the old trees   

Where, as a child, I hunted ghosts and Indians;   

It will look out on the wide gravel sweep

Where I rolled my hoop,

And at the rhododendron bushes

Where I caught black-spotted butterflies.

The old house will guard you,

As I have done.

Its walls and rooms will hold you,

And I shall whisper my thoughts and fancies   

As always,

From the pages of my books.

You will sit here, some quiet Summer night,   

Listening to the puffing trains,

But you will not be lonely,

For these things are a part of me.

And my love will go on speaking to you

Through the chairs, and the tables, and the pictures,   

As it does now through my voice,

And the quick, necessary touch of my hand.