Micro-post #38: The Imagist Amy Lowell [Pride Month 2025 #4]

A poet I've known about for a while, Amy Lowell is both well-known and not known enough. Since she's famous for drawing from her experiences as a lesbian, it feels fitting to make a post about one of her bigger non-poem contributions to poetry during Pride Month: the established "rules" for Imagist poets, which are...

1. To use the language of common speech …

2. To create new rhythms …

3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject …

4. To present an image …

5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.

6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

A lot more about her can be found at the Poetry Foundation website, which also has links to a number of her poems that she published through Poetry Magazine. If you've never read anything by her before, I'm also including a podcast recording of one of her most famous poems, "Lilacs", as an introduction.

TIME cover photo of Amy Lowell, March 2, 1925

"Lilacs" by Amy Lowell, performed by Jacqueline Graham for Words in the Air