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