May 29, 2021

The Taxi by Amy Lowell (1914, United States)

The Taxi

Amy Lowell


When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?



[Amy Lowell, c. 1916]


The American poet and critic Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874-1925) was one of the leading figures in the Imagist movement. Lowell was born into a prominent Boston family. She was the sister of the later astronomer Percival Lowell and of Abott-Lawrence Lowell, who became rector of Harvard University. She herself did not follow a university education (as that was not deemed proper for women at the time), but read a lot, to the point of obsessiveness. She traveled widely, also for a long time through Europe. In 1910 she published her first poems and in 1912 her first collection: A Dome of Many-Colored Glass. Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) was her second book of poems.

Together with her life partner, former actress Ada Dwyer Russell, she traveled to England in 1912 and became friends with Ezra Pound. She joined his Imagist movement, which she also supported financially. While her first collection was still fairly traditional, her later poetry would be more modernist in character under the influence of Pound.

The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. They emphasized the use of precise, sharp images as a means of poetic expression, and strove for precision in their choice of words. The poet was given the freedom in the choice of subject and form and should preferably use colloquial language. Most of the Imagist poets wrote in free verse, using stylistic tools such as assonance and alliteration rather than formal metric schemes to structure their poetry.

As well as being a poet, Lowell was also known as an imposing, self-confident personality and as an advocate for women's rights. She was constantly overweight and smoked big cigars. In 1925 she died of a heart attack, aged 51. In 1926 she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Interestingly, like Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell was deeply interested in Chinese and Japanese culture, and she wrote many paraphrases of poems from those countries, for example in Pictures of the Floating World (1919) and in Fir-Flower Tablets (1921).


[Ada Dwyer Russell]

The poem cited above is one of the love poems Lowell addressed to Ada Dwyer Russell. Others include "Absence", "A Lady In a Garden", and "Madonna of the Evening Flowers." Lowell's poems about Russell have been called the most elegant lesbian love poetry written since Sappho (see "Equal to the Gods").


Cited from Sword Blades and Poppy Seed by Amy Lowell (1914), at Gutenberg.org. This book is in the public domain.

Photos:
Amy Lowell: Houghton Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Ada Dwyer Russell: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons