Amy Lawrence Lowell

Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874-1925) is one of the most discussed names in early 20th-century American poetry, and an unusual figure in tobacco history. Born into Boston's storied Lowell family, the poet did not hide her cigar in an era when women smoking in the open was considered improper; the meerschaum pipes attributed to her in collections have carried her name into pipe literature as well.

Life and Poetry

She was born on 9 February 1874 in Brookline, Massachusetts, at the family's Sevenels estate, where she spent most of her life. She never attended university, educating herself instead in her father's library and among the shelves of the Boston Athenæum. Among her brothers, Percival Lowell was an astronomer and Abbott Lawrence Lowell served as president of Harvard University. She came to writing late: her first collection, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared in 1912. She soon became the American spokesperson for the Imagist movement, compiling three Imagist anthologies; once the movement's direction had taken shape under her hand, Ezra Pound dismissively called it "Amygism." She died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Sevenels on 12 May 1925, and the following year was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock. Her rare-book and manuscript collection was donated to Harvard University, and is preserved today in a room bearing her name at the Houghton Library.