IN JULY 1913, while Dorothy was in Yorkshire, and Aldington and H.D. in Paris, Pound met the woman who was to snatch the imagist staff from his grasp. Amy Lowell, then thirty-nine, had arrived in London, with an introduction from Harriet Monroe, in search of the leader of the imagists. Having already identified herself as an imagist on first reading H.D.’s poems, she had come to find out more. Pound might be from Philadelphia, but he knew about the Boston Lowells, the nearest thing to royalty the States possessed. Amy Lowell’s upbringing in a vast house and grounds with a retinue of servants was in some ways not unlike that of the English monarch’s family, though with some significant differences, not least that it was a family with a good deal more intellectual and artistic distinction than the British royal family could muster. Her grandfather’s cousin had been the poet James Russell Lowell, a leading man of letters in Boston in the late nineteenth century. (He was much respected in England too. Sir Leslie Stephen asked him to be godfather to his daughter Virginia, and the London Library today still has two shelves of his books, while they have not a single volume by his cousin’s grand-daughter and only half a shelf of her great-nephew Robert’s.) One of Amy’s brothers, Lawrence, was president of Harvard. The other, Percival, had founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, having previously spent ten years in Japan, writing several books about Japan which helped to encourage the interest in Japanese culture which had already filtered through to the Tour Eiffel imagists. He inspired his youngest sister with a love of all things Japanese that would feed into her later poetry. Lafcadio Hearn, mentioned earlier as one of the most influential writers on Japan round the turn of the century, had gone to Japan because he read Percival Lowell’s 1888 Soul of the Far East. Percival Lowle, as the family name then was, who first reached Massachusetts twenty years after the Mayflower, claimed direct descent from William the Conqueror, and if the present Lowell family money came from industry rather than land, that was no diminution of status for a long-established New England family. Amy Lowell had a presence and an air of authority that was not unknown among women of the English aristocracy, but was certainly not common among the women Pound usually met. But Pound liked strong characters, until they crossed him, and their relationship began with great cordiality.
When she was only two, Amy Lowell had persuaded the family coachman to let her hold the reins and drive the carriage to church. Had Pound heard that story he might have been more wary. But Amy, although she was eleven years older than he was, had brought out her first book of verse only the year before, and then to the most tepid reviews. Pound, after all, had by now published six collections of poetry, seven if one counted the Cavalcanti translations, and was foreign correspondent of the leading American poetry magazine. He was prepared to be gracious to this new entry in the field, particularly as she was anxious to learn, and most ready to admit her previous poetic sins. (‘When I get through with that girl she’ll think she was born in free verse,’ he reputedly said.)155 He was also interested in her money: well handled, this friendship might find him editor of his own review. Unfortunately, Pound, as so often, was not to handle it well. For now, however, they were mutually charmed. Amy was, like himself, a colourful eccentric. She smoked cigars, at a time when few American women even smoked cigarettes; occasionally, she smoked a pipe. In her palatial home, in which she still slept in the bedroom she had had as a child, on a bed with sixteen pillows, she worked all night, getting up at three in the afternoon. She gave numerous dinner parties, but rarely arrived at them until the dessert course, leaving her companion, the beautiful and gracious former actress Ada Russell, to entertain her guests. Aroused, she was formidable. While in London, she discovered that her publishers, Constable, had failed to distribute her book to British booksellers. She stormed into Constable’s offices, refusing to leave until her books were located and guaranteed to be on the way out. Although not tall (scarcely five foot) she had imposing bulk. An early account described her as looking as wide as she was tall, but although this description is regularly recycled, photographs show that was scarcely the case. She generally wore well-tailored dark jackets, which of course helped, but next to the late Queen Victoria she could have looked, if still stout, a comparatively compact figure of a woman. But she was certainly ample, and her detractors, who later included Pound, mocked her cruelly for her girth, not always behind her back.
For all Amy Lowell’s commanding public persona and strength of purpose, her appearance was a great sorrow to her. A plump little girl, a podgy adolescent, she had become even more overweight as an adult. This was due to a glandular disturbance, though her love of food, particularly puddings, didn’t help. Even as a teenager, she wrote in her diary, ‘really, you know, I am appaulingly fat’.156 (She was a clever child, but not a good speller.) Of course, even the most emaciated teenager might write that, and when she came out as a débutante (Boston-style), a photograph shows her as only, by conventional standards, a little too well covered. But she was awkward and plain too. Now, when she travelled she insisted on having all her hotel suite’s mirrors swathed in black. She suffered from ill health and depression, in both of which her weight played a part.
It was clear to Amy early on that she was a failure in conventional terms as a woman, ‘a great, rough, masculine, strong thing,’ as she described herself as a teenager.157 Yet because she was a woman, she was debarred from the exciting public life her brothers enjoyed. As a child, according to her friend Katie Dana, she had resented being a girl: ‘Amy was deeply grieved she was not a boy. She always tried to walk exactly like her brothers Percy and Lawrence, striding along with her head down and her hat crammed over her ears.’158 She had, Bostonians thought, an unfeminine dislike of authority. The word that best described her, Katie said, was ‘obstreperous’. As a teenager, she found dancing lessons and other mixed social events agonies of embarrassment. Young men were never attracted by her, as they were to the other girls. She wrote in her diary with great candour about a young man she idolised: ‘It is so silly, but when Paul asks Mabel to walk with him I feel like going off alone somewhere & crying. This feeling is mixed with a kind of wish to hit Someone.’159 As a teenager she felt intensely lonely. She was the youngest of her family: as well as her two distinguished brothers she had two sisters, both now married, leaving her the only child at home. Her elder brother Percival was nineteen when she was born, the younger of her sisters twelve: Percival nicknamed her ‘the Postscript’, and that was very much how she felt, an addendum who didn’t quite belong. Her elderly father was always at work, her mother an invalid. She wrote in her diary, ‘What is your idea of happyness?: To be loved’, and a little later, ‘I feel very much in need of a very intimate friend.’160
As she became an adult she began to feel even more intensely what a misfortune it was to be not just a woman, but an unattractive one. Her débutante season was more enjoyable than she expected: her dancing had improved, her obstreperousness had become high spirits, and she was generally liked. But there was no romance; there was a rumour of a possible engagement, but it appears to have come to nothing. Even the Lowell name and fortune could not find her a husband. What was she to do with her life? She had had a scattered education: an English governess, followed by attendance at a tiny private school set up by cousins, the Cabots, for their own girls and a picked handful of their own class. (The well-known Boston rhyme concludes: ‘The Cabots speak only to Lowells/And the Lowells speak only to God’. It didn’t work quite like that in the school: Amy talked everyone else down.) Her mother had taught her French, which became excellent in her early twenties when she devoured French novelists and poets, but how was she to use that skill? What she would really have liked to have been was an actress, though it would have caused seismic waves in Boston if a Lowell woman had gone on the stage. But in any case she didn’t have the looks.
So in her twenties she went to the theatre; she travelled; she read. She had discovered poetry in her teenage years, finding Leigh Hunt’s Imaginary Conversations in her father’s study, which led her to Keats, the poet who remained her passion, but she did not at this stage think of writing poetry herself. She experimented with novels and plays, for she had been a precocious teller and writer of stories as a child, starting various short-lived mimeographed magazines, written largely by herself, and, at the age of thirteen, with the aid of her mother, producing a book entitled Dream Drops, or Stories from Fairy Land, by a Dreamer. She sold this on behalf of Boston’s Perkins Institute for the Blind and raised $56, a foreshadowing of her later career as, in Eliot’s words, the ‘demon saleswoman’ of poetry.161 For now, however, her attempts at prose came to nothing. Her mother died when she was twenty-two, after a painful illness of many years that harrowed Amy, who as the only child at home was the one to bear the emotional brunt of her mother’s bitterness and despair. The following year she visited Africa, quite an adventure for a young woman, where she discovered what contemporary women explorers and anthropologists (for example, the British Mary Kingsley or the American Matilda Stevenson and Alice Fletcher) already knew, that white women could have all the pleasures of manly command in a colonial situation. She came back with a taste for power, but her health was impaired, not by any exotic illness, but because she had attempted the Banting diet (nothing but tomatoes and asparagus, preferably, as in her case, while travelling up the Nile). She did not lose much weight, but it made her very ill, and she suffered from a variety of gastric and nervous ailments for several years
It was only after her father died in 1900 that she began to find herself. Her father had lived a frugal, disciplined, narrow existence that had increasingly weighed on Amy. It cannot be a coincidence that the title of her first book of poetry was a quotation from Shelley, the atheist poet whose works her father would not allow in the house. Her late rising, not permitted while he was alive, may have been partly a reaction against her father’s mores: he got up every morning in summer at 4 a.m., in winter at 4.30, rather earlier than Amy in 1913 went to bed. Perhaps the death of her parents, and the freedom that gave her to run her own life, was a similar catalyst to that Pound and H.D. found in leaving for Europe. Her father’s one passion appears to have been for horticulture, and when Sevenels, the family mansion, was built, he designed magnificent floral gardens, which Amy loved and whose flowers fill her poetry. She bought out her brothers and sisters, and remained in the house. She involved herself with various good works – a wonderful outlet for the restless energies of the Boston upper class, though not always appreciated by those to whom they insisted on doing good – and she began to play a part in Boston voluntary and charitable societies, discovering a talent for public speaking. But she still lacked a sense of direction. Then, in 1902, when she was twenty-eight, she went to see the famous actress Eleanor Duse. She had seen her act a couple of times before, but this time she was electrified. She went home and wrote ‘seventy-one lines of blank bad verse’.162 She realised a poet was what she wanted to be.
The Lowells were not opposed to literary work; after all, her great-great-cousin, James Russell Lowell, had been a famous poet in his day – as a child Amy loyally insisted he was her favourite poet – and she had met Longfellow, another gentleman poet, at the age of five. In that way she was luckier than Edith Wharton, who was born, ten years before Amy, into the best New York society; Wharton writes in her memoir that ‘my parents and their group, though they held literature in great esteem, stood in nervous dread of those who produced it … On the whole, my mother doubtless thought, it would be simpler if people one might be exposed to meeting would refrain from meddling with literature.’163 Yet while the Lowells took a much less philistine view when it came to male writers, for a lady to publish was quite another matter. Amy had already caused scandal in the family by speaking in public in the course of her work for good causes; publishing poetry would be even worse.
Amy was not to publish her first poem for another eight years, but from 1902 on she was writing regularly. She transformed Sevenels from the puritan stronghold that it had been under her father’s management, turning the front and back parlours into one vast library to house her regular purchases of books, adding wooden panels, built-in bookcases and a safe, camouflaged by dummy books, for the rare manuscripts and books she came to delight in purchasing. She acquired a Whistler and a Constable to hang over the two fireplaces, and later some Japanese wood-blocks. The library doubled as a theatre, and home theatricals became a regular occurrence. She turned the billiard room into an elegant music room, in which piano and song recitals took place. She kept her bedroom suite on the third floor, but repainted it sky blue and hung up dark-blue toned Hiroshiges that Percival had sent her from Japan. Visitors were shown up there, and Amy would entertain them from her vast bed. She installed an outsize tiled bath – her love of bathing was something she would celebrate unashamedly in later poetry. She also installed electricity in the house; it was said, indeed, that she ‘electrified it in more ways than one’.164
In 1908 Lowell became infatuated with another actress, Lina Abarbanell, whom she had seen in a Boston production of The Merry Widow. Abarbanell became a frequent visitor, causing considerable scandal among Boston society by singing risqué songs at a Sunday evening party that Amy gave. Amy was not a whit disconcerted, and continued to see much of her and to shower her with presents. On one occasion Abarbanell brought along a young musician, Carl Engel, who had been trained in France and was working for a Boston music publisher. Carl became an invaluable stimulus and support in the years when she was struggling to become a writer, and she was very attached to him. Amy was undoubtedly bisexual in her desires, and even after Ada Dwyer Russell became her much-loved companion, she retained her penchant for the companionship of handsome young men. Over the years, Engel introduced Amy to modern composers largely unknown in the States, such as Bartók, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Satie, and gave her advice on her concerts. He encouraged her writing, setting two of her poems to music, and he would later, and most significantly, introduce her to the French symbolistes. He was a good friend, though he found Amy at times very emotionally demanding, prone as she was to wild enthusiasms and deep depressions. Amy now knew she wanted to write poetry, but she was full of self-doubt and unsure of her talent, and Engel was admirably patient in his reassurances. Her biographer Jean Gould says letters that she wrote to Engel suggest she would have liked their relationship to be more than friendship, but he, though an important support at a crucial stage in her life, had no such intentions. Luckily for them both, Ada Dwyer Russell came along.
This was in early 1912, at a tense time for Amy, for she was just about to submit her first book of poems to the solid Boston firm of Houghton Mifflin. She planned to call it A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, using the well-known phrase from Adonais, Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, to signal her own admiration for Keats’ works. She had attempted publication for the first time in 1910, sending four poems to the Atlantic Monthly, which gratifyingly accepted them instantly. She had equally little problem in persuading Ferris Greenslet, the editor with whom she would work for many years at Houghton Mifflin, to publish her first volume, but she was racked with anxiety beforehand. She wrote to Carl Engel, who much to her dismay was away in Paris: ‘I have been collecting my poems for the book, and they do seem to me so bad. Barely a half dozen which I like at all. Tonight it seems to me I should put them all in the fire and take up crocheting. Only of course I should crochet badly!’165 She didn’t put them in the fire, or take up crochet, but she remained very nervous. Then in March she met Ada, an able character actress, whom she had seen on the stage more than once; this time she was performing in a smash hit by the name of The Deep Purple at a Boston theatre, and was invited to be a guest speaker at a Boston ladies’ lunch club. Amy, still keenly interested in the theatre, had herself appeared in various amateur productions, mainly in the Sevenels library, including Wilde’s The Ideal Husband; she must have had quite a gift, because people who saw her perform, Foster Damon tells us, said ‘she acted so brilliantly that one quite forgot her figure’.166 Jean Gould suggests Amy went to the lunch club, which she did not often attend, Boston lunchtime being somewhat before her usual breakfast hour, specifically for acting tips, but Amy was a general theatre groupie and may mainly have wanted to meet another diva. She and Ada took to each other immediately. Ada was eleven years older than Amy, cultured, calm, diplomatic, reassuring. Amy showed her all her poems and, much to her relief, Ada approved of them all except one. Amy agreed with her judgement, but decided the offending poem was necessary to the order of the book, so could not be removed.
Ada went off on tour at the end of March, but she agreed to spend some of the summer with Amy in Dublin, New Hampshire, in her country retreat, a house named Broomley Lacey, with 64 acres of ground, that Amy had bought shortly after her father’s death. There, as well as discussing poetry and the theatre, they rode, rowed (Jean Gould says they gardened, but I think that must mean gave instructions to the gardeners) and petted Amy’s English sheep-dogs, on whom she was said to lavish affection ‘almost to the point of lasciviousness’.167 It would be just over a year later, in the autumn of 1913, that Ada agreed to live permanently at Sevenels, after her theatrical career had been interrupted by a major illness; she was to help Amy ‘on a business basis’ with her books, and Amy would pay her what she would have earned in the theatre.168 Amy had finally gained her ‘very intimate friend’, who brought her a happiness she had despaired of finding. She had written mournfully to Engel just before she met Ada: ‘I wonder why I, with all my natural appetite for love and happiness in a superlative degree, should have managed so badly as to carve out for myself a life made of ashes & fog.’169 One of the poems in that first book, ‘A Fairy Tale’, recalls how, as a child, for her the glamour of the fairy tale was always darkened by the fact that ‘there was always one unbidden guest/Who cursed the child and left it bitterness’. Now, as an adult, in spite of many advantages, she finds that ‘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.’170 All that was to change. Her prince, or rather her princess, had arrived.
In the interim, however, back in Boston without Ada, Amy went through a very low period after the publication of A Dome, which came out in October 1912. The book, which her first biographer, Foster Damon, describes as ‘blighted by proprieties and almost paralysed by despair’, received little attention, and what it did was likewarm.171 Louis Untermeyer, then a young critic, later an admirer of her work, who would write the introduction to her Complete Poetical Works in 1955, dismissed these first poems as ‘belatedly Tennysonian’ and accused Lowell of imagining ‘a fatuous, fancied kinship with Keats’.172 Amy was devastated, and took to her bed with what the doctor called ‘nervous exhaustion’; she only recovered by heading after Christmas to Atlantic City to watch Ada on the stage.
Yet, even before the book had appeared, Amy had begun to experiment in less conventional forms. Carl Engel had sent her from Paris a copy of Albert Samain’s Chariot d’or, thus introducing her to French symbolism and vers libre. Samain, who had died in 1900 at the age of forty-two, was highly thought of in the pre-war years; in the anthology that Flint admired so much, Les Poètes d’aujourd’hui, his poetry was accorded twice as many pages as Rimbaud’s. Amy was deeply impressed by his striking imagery and flexible verse forms, and began to realise the decorous, orderly poetry she had been producing was not the medium for her. One reviewer had said of her book, ‘Never do we feel that behind the lines lurks a dynamic personality’.173 Did that comment give her food for thought? All of Boston knew she had a dynamic personality – why was she not allowing that dynamism into her poetry? The poetry in A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass is riddled with poetic clichés, and is, totally unlike the rest of her life, cautiously conventional. She read more symbolist and post-symbolist poets, and began to write her first free-verse poems, as in Flint’s early poems, moderating her use of rhyme and regular line lengths rather than abandoning them. She managed to include one of these, ‘Before the Altar’, as a late addition to the book, where it appears as the opening poem. Like ‘A Fairy Tale’ it is a dark poem, with strange imagery of self-immolation, a statement perhaps of her desperation and fears as a novice poet: ‘Empty and silent … On this stone, in this urn/I pour my heart and watch it burn,/My self the sacrifice.’174 In addition to her original epigraph – one that all her readers would have expected, the lines from Shelley from which her title was taken – she added another from Albert Samain, which, like ‘Before the Altar’, is full of angst: ‘Le silence est si grand que mon coeur frisonne/Seul, le bruit de mes pas sur le pavé resonne’.175
In the summer of 1912, Amy, like Pound, had had a letter from Harriet Monroe, who had read her poems in the Atlantic Monthly, enclosing a prospectus for Poetry and asking her to contribute poetry and help. Amy sent a rather meagre cheque for $25, which did not disappoint Monroe, who did not then know about the Lowell fortune. Indeed, in her autobiography Monroe records having been rather pleased by the thought that ‘evidently there was at least one poet with a bank-account’.176 Amy a little later sent her two of these new poems, which Monroe promptly accepted, though she did not make use of them for some time. So it came about that in January 1913, when Amy was reading hopefully through that month’s Poetry in search of her own poems, she came across H.D.’s, and made the decision that she was an imagiste too.
Shortly after this epiphanic moment, Amy was invited to a dinner in Chicago. Her brother, Lawrence, who had become president of Harvard in 1909, was being given a banquet by the Harvard alumni, male only, as was customary, but a smaller female gathering was planned for his wife. Her sister-in-law, Anna, herself a Lowell and a third cousin, strongly disapproved of Amy’s unconventional ways and cannot have been pleased to have found her name on the guest list, but there was nothing to be done. Another of the guests was Harriet Monroe, probably for Anna Lowell a much more congenial dinner companion, as she could always be relied on to observe the proprieties. Harriet recounted the event after Amy’s death, explaining that up till then she had had no knowledge of ‘Boston genealogies’, and no idea that the poet she had contacted came from a leading family there. Amy, of course, was late: ‘As we were beginning the dessert, an imposing figure appeared in the remote distance at the top of a half-flight of stairs, and “Oh, there’s Amy!” said Mrs Lowell, in a voice which accepted resignedly anything which Amy might do.’ Harriet still, she said, did not connect this Amy with the person whose poems she had accepted, and just watched with amazement the way ‘the ponderous and regal figure … took possession of the occasion, and the company’. She was much taken aback, on being introduced to Amy, to have her turn ‘a powerfully reproachful eye on [her] with the query, “Well since you’ve taken ’em, why don’t you print ’em?”’177 Doubtless the story lost nothing in the telling, and Amy’s poems still did not appear until July; Harriet was not easily intimidated.
That spring, Amy was becoming aware of other changes in the arts. Engel returned from France, bringing news of composers so far unknown to Boston, and Amy’s concerts now featured the work of Debussy, Fauré and Satie. The Armory show, the inaugurating moment of modernist art in America, came to Boston, and Amy duly visited it, though, if not antagonistic, she was certainly puzzled. She continued to read Poetry and was becoming more and more intrigued by the imagists, being fascinated by Pound’s list of ‘Don’ts’ in the March issue. She decided that she must meet these poets, and having prevailed upon Harriet for a letter of introduction to Pound, set sail. Ada was tied up with a theatrical production, so she took as her companion the wife of her favourite nephew, James Roosevelt. Quite what her niece-in-law did in London isn’t clear; none of the accounts of Amy’s doings there mention her. Perhaps she went shopping, or sightseeing with friends of her own. Presumably she stayed, like Amy, in the suite of rooms at the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly, where Amy entertained.
It would be intriguing to know what Monroe’s letter of introduction said, but whatever it was, Pound came to dinner at the Berkeley and put himself out to be charming. Lowell was amused by his determination to look the part of the poet, though she must have felt some envy too. There was nothing she could do to make herself look poetical. To Carl Engel she described ‘the erratic young poet, Ezra Pound’, who dressed like a stage poet, as ‘the oddest youth, clever, fearfully conceited, &, at the same time, excessively thin-skinned’.178 But she told Harriet he had a ‘sweep of conversation and youthful enthusiasm which keeps him talking delightfully as many hours as you please’, and though she disapproved slightly of his ‘chip-on-the-shoulder attitude’, said she thought it would disappear in time; how wrong she was.179 Pound told Harriet he thought Lowell ‘pleasingly intelligent’, and reported to his mother that ‘Miss Lowell gives me hope for the future of America. She says her brother is as intelligent as she is so there may even be some hope for Harvard.’180 Pound was naturally free with his advice to her, but Amy was an eager pupil. The poems that had eventually come out in Poetry that July were still to some extent using conventional forms, even if influenced by vers libre, but she had written one free-verse poem, ‘In a Garden’, which Pound liked, and promised to publish. It was a love poem to Ada, 22 lines long, in irregular stanzas, and the last seven lines went:
And I wished for night and you.
I wanted to see you in the swimming pool,
White and shining in the silver-flecked water,
While the moon rode over the garden,
High in the arch of night,
And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness.
Night and water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!181
The naked female body bathing became a repeated motif in Lowell’s poetry, an erotic image of joyous liberation from the constraints of Bostonian sobriety and starch. The contrast between the sensuous imagery and the stout Boston Brahmin would be cruelly highlighted the next year, but for now Pound was delighted to have a new and rich disciple, though he made no attempts to get her to part with her money as yet. He reported proudly to his parents that she had motored him about 200 miles in one day. ‘I am still wind scorched,’ he told Dorothy the next day; clearly one of the perils of motoring in 1913.182
Pound took Amy to meet Yeats, and to tea with Ford and Hunt at South Lodge. He also introduced her to Fletcher, now back in England, taking him along on another of his visits to the Berkeley. On that occasion Pound monopolised the conversation, declaiming his own poems while Fletcher once again, as so often, sat in stony silence, but as they left Fletcher plucked up his courage to ask Lowell if he could return to read some of his poetry. Amy agreed warmly, and the reading duly took place; to Fletcher’s delight, Lowell exclaimed, ‘Why, my dear boy, you have genius’, something he noted with satisfaction that she had not said to Pound.183 They took greatly to each other. When she returned home she recommended his poems to Harriet, though, as Ben Johnson points out, rather less fervently than she had to Fletcher’s face, commenting, ‘Queer though they are, they seem to show great originality’.184 She and Fletcher met several times again before she left, and it may have been on his advice that she visited the Russian Ballet, the Poetry Bookshop and an exhibition of Post-Impressionist painting. She gave Fletcher a copy of her book, which he thought ‘uniformly stifled, muffled, conventional, academic, timid, and tame’. She was, he commented, at the age of forty, ‘only beginning to conquer the cramping conventionalities of her girlhood’, and he felt sympathy with her, having had his own struggle to free himself; he was delighted by ‘her attitude of unabashed eagerness, the entire mental semblance she bore to a mine of unfettered energy ready to explode and go skyward’.185 He says that in London she wrote several of the vers libre poems that would be published the next year, and claims in his 1937 memoir that he thought she was imitating him. At the time, however, he appears to have been entirely uncritical of her, and if he thought there were any likenesses, took them as a compliment. In mid- or late August, Amy returned to the States. The crossing was extremely hot, and she would escape from her cabin in the dark to smoke her Manila cigars on deck. Unfortunately, she was spotted. On the quay as she returned she was met by a flock of newspaper reporters incredulously demanding if it were true that the sister of the president of Harvard smoked not just cigarettes but cigars. Yes, indeed, she said, and the news was splashed all over the next day’s paper. She was getting into practice for her future career as the muchpublicised leader of a revolutionary poetic movement. The issue of women’s smoking was an example of the way in which American society remained more conservative than British; it is true that even in London women smoking cigars was unusual, as indeed it still is today, but it was acceptable for women to smoke in the home if not the street. Causing scandal in the States Lowell would find delightfully easy.