An oft-quoted remark attributed to poet Amy Lowell applies to both her determined personality and her sense of humor: "God made me a business woman," Lowell is reported to have quipped, "and I made myself a poet." During a career that spanned just over a dozen years, she wrote and published over 650 poems, yet scholars cite Lowell's tireless efforts to awaken American readers to contemporary trends in poetry as her more influential contribution to literary history. Following her untimely death in 1925, a collection of Lowell's work, published posthumously as What's O'Clock", was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. But a shift in poetic fashions all but obliterated the memory of Lowell's poetic achievements. The reasons for that eclipse lie both in the poet and in her audience. Lowell was very prolific and very uneven. Because so much of her poetry was bad, it was easy to judge...