According to Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw in Amy Lowell, American Modern, Lowell's third book of poetry, Men, Women, and Ghosts almost sold out before it was published. They quote an October 1916 review in the Boston Evening Transcript by William Stanley Braithwaite praising Lowell for "bringing a new force into the world." "Patterns" contributed to that new force and to this volume that established Lowell as a popular poet. One of her early biographers, poet Horace Gregory, points out in Amy Lowell: Portrait of the Poet in her Time that Lowell's fame grew from 1916 forward. Of the many poets known during World War I, her name is the first.

However, Gregory concludes that Lowell was "an archetypical American clubwoman"—wealthy, idle, indulgent—and not a poet, a statement that Paul Lauter quotes in his essay "Amy Lowell and Cultural Borders." Lauter gives a glancing review of...