Amy Lowell, A Critical Appreciation.
Her Second Book
Bryher, W. Amy Lowell. A Critical Appreciation. (The Art of Amy Lowell.) London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., 1918.
Slim 4to.; faint, occasional foxing; red printed wrappers, string-tied; darkened; lightly worn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of Bryher’s second book (a second edition came out in the same year), which she begins with a brief biographical note about Lowell, describing her discovery of Lowell’s work as a near epiphany: “I had stumbled into a freshness of vision denied so long that it had become a myth” (p. 8). In her memoirs, A Heart to Artemis, she expounds on her discovery of Lowell, whose writing she was introduced to in an anthology of Imagist poems; she claims that she and Lowell:
…respond emotionally in situations resembling our own. I did not know that Amy Lowell was largely confined to her home through illness and that her work reflected the frustrations from which she suffered. I was unable to expand because of the war. It was natural to feel the similarity in the two situations. I wrote her, she answered and was extremely kind to me but by the time that we met the circumstances were different and I could not bear to think of lines that recalled to me the lonely miseries of the first war….I was a disappointment to her eventually but it was inevitable under the circumstances. (p. 179)
Bryher met Lowell in 1921; Lowell met her when she arrived in America after a tiring ordeal aboard the ship on which she crossed the Atlantic. Bryher confesses her inexplicable reticence in regards to her time with Lowell:
It was almost as bad the next afternoon when Amy took me for a drive and kept saying to me, “Look at the light under the bridge, what would you call it?” All I could mumble was I didn’t know and she was disappointed. I had dinner with her that evening, and Jean Untermayer who was also there and realized that I was in a state of shock teases me to this day about frozen silence with which I regarded the party. (p. 197)
On the next page, she repeats her belief that, “Amy Lowell was disappointed in me” (199); clearly, this was a frustrating turn of events for Bryher, who had already published her Critical Appreciation three years earlier.
Included in this book are some of Bryher’s favorite Lowell poems – like “The Fairy Tale;” “A Gift;” “A Lady;” “Patience;” and “Patterns” – offering her analysis and praise of each. Bryher is most affected by the Imagism in Lowell’s poetry; of “A Gift,” for example, she gushes, “This is an excellent illustration of the new or Imagist tendencies in poetry. There is not a single useless word. The whole atmosphere is etched by a single line at the beginning and merges into an emotion, stripped to its beating elements, into a dream rhythmic with colour” (p. 16).
The manner in which Bryher describes Lowell’s poetry suggests it to be melancholic, an appropriate classification considering they are the products of a Victorian mind: “They are very beautiful, these poems, though sad with a more than immature weariness – the weariness of silence, of a loneliness so passionate it must have an outlet, and so stumbles, faltering, into words” (p. 13); and, later, “[Lowell] belongs to the very few whose poems are almost pain to read, acute they are with beauty” (p. 39). She concludes with high praise: “Most individual of writers, she possesses a vision seldom encountered even in poetry, a power of giving perfect expression to another’s emotion in a concise and trenchant line” (p. 48).
The historical novelist, poet, critic and magazine editor Bryher (1894-1983) was born Annie Winnifred Ellerman; she changed her name to Bryher – which is one of the Scilly Islands off the coast of England where she vacationed with her family as a child – when she began to be published in order to separate herself from her well-known family. She was educated by private tutors as her family traveled frequently during her childhood.
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