A descendant of a clan of cultivated New England intellectuals whose forebears, the Lowles of Somersetshire, immigrated to America in the seventeenth century, Amy Lowell took pride in her illustrious ancestry. From 1913 until her death in 1925, Lowell was in the forefront of the renascence in modern American poetry that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century, a period which witnessed the brief but influential Anglo-American literary phenomenon, imagism, with which she was deeply involved.

Lowell will not be remembered for her poetry, but her contribution as poet-critic, biographer, reviewer, propagandist, and spokesman for modern poetry is without parallel. Robert Frost commented on her promotional activities: "We all lost a publicity agent when she died. She stomped the country for everyone."

A well-born Boston Brahmin, Lowell maintained an individuality and single-mindedness which is reflected in A Critical Fable (1922): "No one likes to be bound/In a...