Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.

"A

Shelley, "Adonais".

DOME of Many-Coloured Glass" was the name of Amy Lowell's first book, a title, indeed, which might well be given to her own elegy. Few American poets have stained the white radiance with more beautiful and brilliant colors than Amy Lowell, and fewer still have erected in so short a space of time so imposing and withal so fragile a dome. Whether any of the colors there are indelible or not it is too soon to say, but that they will assume new tints, even if faded ones, in the light of the future, it does not take the spirit of prophecy to predict. Biographer, critic, lecturer, translator, and poet but transcending all of these a personality with the gift of enlightening discussion her claim to a niche in the hall of fame of American literature is a strong one. In this generation at least the memory of her learned and witty, her keen and often biting conversation, will linger as the talk of Dr. Johnson and Coleridge lingered in the fond remembrance of their contemporaries. For Amy Lowell had the greatest woman's tongue that has so far disturbed the United States. Sometimes wisely cruel, often constructively devastating, she also had in her, to the full, the capacity for generous and warm affection which in an intellectual and retrospective way she lavished upon Keats.

It is this womanly and human trait which makes the sorrow of her passing so poignant to her more intimate

friends. She takes with her the electric atmosphere necessary to fill the static vacuum which her departure has made. There is no one like her to turn to in times of intellectual and æsthetic doubt, no one so convincing to advise with about a literary difficulty, no one who is such an accurate barometer of the literary weather. The personal help of a passionate and sympathetic soul cast in a tremendous mold has gone. The big house in Brookline must be lonely without her. It is now a source of vague longing and disquiet instead of comfort in the back of one's mind. One cannot help but wonder about the flowers and birds in the garden, the ashes on the hearth in the silent library, the unsmoked cigars, the incomplete manuscripts, the bright poems that have gone down to smolder like jewels in the dark.

For Amy Lowell was only fifty one when she died, leaving a great part of her lifework and her promise unfulfilled. There was to have been an "Emily Dickinson" to follow "John Keats", a number of poems, and who knows what other gleanings from a brain so fertile; certainly criticism, analysis, and comment without which we shall be the poorer. By the terms of her will Miss Lowell has provided for the publication of some of her manuscripts, and there will be a posthumous volume of poetry issued in Boston this coming fall, but no bequest to the future can be so generous and significant as a few more years of her life would have been. Her death, following immediately after the publica

tion of the definitive Life of Keats, was dramatic, but it was none the less untimely. Important as her further writing might have been, it is she herself who is the great loss.

Amy Lowell, the living, breathing woman, stands out so far above and beyond her work, that it is my feeling that many of the things she wrote, barring "Keats", have mainly an extrinsic interest due to the significance of her dynamic personality in her work as a whole rather than to an inspired quality inherent in the work itself. This I believe is especially true of her poetry. Not that there may not be poems of hers here and there dowered with sufficient strength of beauty, form, imagination, and music to permit them to march a considerable distance into time; but taking her poetry as a whole, it seems to me that its chief interest and value must always be in the examples it gives of her theories of verse in actual operation. Her criticism I believe will stand on a different basis. Such a book as "Tendencies", despite its doubtful prophecies as to the future direction of the main currents of American poetry, must remain as a milestone in the history of American verse and for the most part retain a value as a keen analysis of the important figures which it portrays.

But literature to Amy Lowell, both creative and critical, was a substitute for something she found lacking in the real world about her. There was in her a certain feverish necessity to create, to examine and move on, which had about it the earmarks of unfulfilled desire and sometimes the startled hurry of a retreat. She was, as we all know, fond of screens and surfaces, and she embroidered and bejeweled them lavishly. Patterns were her specialty. One wonders what silent eyes watched her through the fabrics from the space be

-

the

tween the arras and the wall
bare white wall, over which she reared
the dome of many-colored glass to shut
out the intolerable black pall in the
white radiance which Archibald Mac-
Leish has called "nothing nothing
-nothing nothing at all". Hence
her hurry from one thing to another, the
passing flashes of the torch of her genius
into dark places, the examination of
porcelains and ivory carvings, of all
beautiful and fragile things, as if life
were a cabinet that hid within its secret
drawer some secret more lovely than all
its bricabrac hence, too, the inevita-
ble disappointment and the crash and
tinkle of the little sherds of precious
glass and jade as she hurried, hurried on
to something new. There must have
been moments and hours of insight
when the whole dome came rattling and
pounding down about her feet. She
says so herself, in a "Fairy Tale". It
is more than the mere decorator who is
speaking now-

The fire falls asunder, all is changed,
I am no more a child, and what I see
Is not a fairy tale, but life, my life.
The gifts are there, the many pleasant
things:

Health, wealth, long-settled friendships, with a name

Which honours all who bear it, and the

power

Of making words obedient. This is much; But overshadowing all is still the curse, That never shall I be fulfilled by love! Along the parching highroad of the world No other soul shall bear mine company. Always shall I be teased with semblances, With cruel impostures, which I trust awhile Then dash to pieces, as a careless boy Flings a kaleidoscope, which shattering Strews all the ground about with coloured sherds.

So I behold my visions on the ground No longer radiant, an ignoble heap Of broken, dusty glass. And so, unlit, Even by hope or faith, my dragging steps Force me forever through the passing days. This then was the great tragedy, the secret of her relentless toil. Like so many other men and women in our civilization who devote themselves to

the intensive cultivation of the intellect and of art, she paid the penalty and leaves no descendants. The faces of her children are to be found only in the pages of books; these at least she has projected into time. But all this does not make them any the less significant or real to us; indeed, because of the burning life force that went into them they are all the more valuable. In the biography of Keats, however, Amy Lowell finally fulfilled herself. Into it went all the creative energy of her body and soul, her finest critical acumen, her vast scholarship, and her love for a noble man. In it, surface and man and background are complete, and fused into one.

But

In the same way in which she transcended most of her work, so above these flashes of the sunshine and shadow of her life towered the woman herself. It is the loss of this strong willed personality and its influence which will affect American poetry, and affect it, at least for the present, profoundly. Her writing remains the same, no better and no worse because she is no longer here; it can only abide the test of time. we of the present are robbed of one of the great influences for free and hot discussion in the field of an art which is always trying to freeze and congeal. She was one of the few personages in American poetry that had the knack of making the critical problems of verse generally interesting, one of the few. that could confer life and pertinent direction upon unhampered inquiry. The very opposition she aroused was healthy forts which do not have to be defended are abandoned to decay. Whether the strongholds fell before her or not is a moot question, but the very fact that she summoned them to surrender has given a more marching and virile strain to the music of their garriI am afraid that the long peace

sons.

which her departure threatens will make way again for the thin music of lutes.

Miss Lowell, more than anyone else, helped to give to our poetry its two main modern categories those of "old" and of "free" verse. Like so many important poets since the Civil War she felt that the norm of important modern utterance is prose, that poetry like any other thing must compromise and, with the prevailing literary form of the era in which it is written, approach the rhythms of spoken speech in the life of the day. This it must do in some way, she believed, if it was to carry emotion intelligibly to modern. ears. Largely under her championing the inchoate rhythms of Whitman, who held somewhat the same theory, took on a more definite guise and went through a secondary education in the Imagist school. Miss Lowell's theories finally congealed in the form of polyphonic prose. Provided with a disconcerting battery of clever special pleadings, some sound critical reasons, and a masterful propaganda, she was able to open a breach even in the wall of prejudice. The city beyond was not taken, but the artillery duel will go on over her grave, it is to be hoped. She would enjoy the sound of the guns. The result to date seems to be that it is no longer possible to attract attention by merely writing in free verse. Within the bounds of intelligible communication and sustained rhythms it has simply become one of the many ways in which to write poetry.

Amy Lowell's success in making herself a great personality was due largely to three factors: the energy, culture, and conservatism of her New England tradition and ancestry, a native originality and strength of character, and a cosmopolitan outlook and aristocratic experience which enabled her to blend the first two into the unity of an integrated

1

soul. She was not always able to escape the inhibitions of Puritanism, and this, with the sense of frustration already mentioned, may account for a certain coldness and preoccupation with things extrahuman. which pervades much of her poetry. In her effort to free herself she sometimes became melodramatic. It is only fair to add, however, that in decorating surfaces Miss Lowell took backgrounds for granted, and it is largely those that lack the latter who complain of her preoccupation with the former. She was among the first to make available in English a considerable body of Chinese poetry. Aside from any question as to their inherent values, these translations of Chinese classics are significant because they show that American literature, which began in Europe, is already beginning to look toward Asia. In Amy Lowell the two tendencies met and blended with a strange exotic glow against a dark background of New England past and present. The result was a new and gorgeous color, perhaps a portent.

The last years of her life were devoted to the infinite labor and fatal expenditure of energy required by the compilation of material for and the writing of over 1,400 pages of lucid prose in her biography of John Keats. Miss Lowell considered Keats to be the source of much of her inspiration. She admired in his character a certain combination of practical ability, human sympathy, love of nature, and poetical vision which she found in herself. This sympathy, together with the vast fund of source material which she possessed, and could draw upon, has enabled her successfully to rescue him from the legend of the namby pamby, moonstruck, wailing lover, the talented weakling who could not survive criticism, that was for so long the darling of

the sentimentalists. Along with the poet himself, she has set forth Fanny Brawne as a new and dignified womanly figure. "Keats, you know," Miss Lowell was fond of saying, "would have made a good doctor if he had not been a better poet." And therein, as she knew, much of his secret lay, a genius for hard work. That might have been her motto, too. No one ever worked harder, night after night, year after year. The days, partly for the sake of privacy, she gave to sleep. It is literally true that she worked herself to death.

Under the exacting demands of the translation and preparation of her book of Chinese poetry, and her unremitting toil in the labor of love over Keats, her health began to fail rapidly. Complications arising from an accident of many years ago necessitated a series of surgical operations which brought only temporary relief. temporary relief. Moving about became visibly painful. Although she still drove herself, it became patent that the publication of "Keats" would have to be delayed. In October, 1924, she writes:

I realize that some things are impossible. Judging from the condition the book is now in, it will be impossible to bring it out sooner. I am absolutely drowned in proof. A few years before nothing would have seemed "impossible", and she would have reveled in proof. She finished "Keats" and the first proofs of a new volume of poetry, "What's O'clock", with the hands nearing the fatal hour. The end was indeed close at hand. Only one more scene was permitted.

In early April, a few weeks after the belated appearance of "Keats", a committee of her old Boston friends tendered her a dinner. As the honor guest of what was almost a dramatic occasion, she received the congratulations of her older and younger contempo