Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw (eds.). Amy Lowell, American Modern. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004 [Book review]

From the publication of her first book, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass in 1912, until her death in 1925, Amy Lowell reigned as an important, influential, and well-known modernist poet. She published eleven books during her lifetime, edited three volumes of the Imagist anthology, Some Imagist Poets, gave numerous well-attended readings and lectures, and regularly contributed work to leading magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly. She also helped to fund and contributed work to a variety of literary magazines including Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. Lowell was a respected contemporary of the poets most often associated with the modernist movement, whether they supported her projects and ideas or whether, like Ezra Pound, they openly expressed their irritation and frustration. In the years just following her death, Lowell’s reputation continued to flourish with the posthumous publication of her lectures and essays in Poetry and Poets as well as with three additional collections of poetry, including What’s O’Clock which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1926. Given her importance as a poet, critic, and editor, the limited amount of critical attention she has received after 1930 and the fact that all of her books have been out of print for decades seem to be a glaring oversight on the part of scholars and publishers. The editors of and contributors to Amy Lowell, American Modern seek to remedy this situation by instigating a serious critical conversation about Lowell and her work as well as by bringing many of her poems back into print through a companion volume, Selected Poems of Amy Lowell (2003).