Sapphic Echoes in American Poetry: Amy Lowell and the Feminization of the Imagist Movement

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) published in many of the most prestigious and relevant poetry journals of her lifetime both in the United States and in Europe. In the thirteen years that spanned from her discovery of poetic writing till her death she was absolutely convinced that the general public was prepared to understand and to enjoy the new poetics advocated by the modernist movement at large. This conviction took her on many tours around the country delivering papers on the subject and participating in poetry readings that were authentic stand up performances that the public greatly appreciated. The importance of this is that Amy Lowell, being herself one of the most prominent propellers of avant-guard tendencies in the American poetic spectrum of the time, introduced the public to the precepts of Imagism and its possibilities of newness in the poetic discourse. All in all, one of the most interesting aspects in Amy Lowell’s contribution to American poetry is her insistence in approaching imagism from a feminine perspective leading in this way a serious approach to poetry written by women, by no means the only one, that presupposed the feminization of a movement that started as a very much masculine and elitist entrepreneur. The inclusion of a rigorous study of the poetry written by women in this context implies that the poetic voice of the female writer be taken seriously and be directly inscribed in the poetic world of the first half of the twentieth century that acts as a springboard to most of the new tendencies in American poetry to be observed nowadays. As Lillian Faderman has noticed from Sappho until the 1970s there will be little opportunities to read such irreverent poems against patriarchal postulates in relation to women’s poetic subject position as those written by Amy Lowell. To explore this postulate is the main aim and objective in the pages of this paper