Amy Lowell and the Music of Her Poetry

Abstract

ALTHOUGH she had no formal training in music, Amy Lowell's sensitive and discerning ear for the rhythms of poetry helped her to hear music in a way usually open only to musicians. Both the analogies to and analyses of music in her poems and prose writings show a profound dedication to the art whose origins were rooted in her own, and several of her poems are highly original in the manner in which they translate music to verse. Between August 1908 and January 1922, Amy Lowell was introduced to new compositions by European and American composers through her relationship with Carl Engel (18831944). Following his training in Strasbourg and Munich, Engel had emigrated to the United States in 1905. He held distinguished posts as editor and advisor at the Boston Music Co., chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress, president of music publishing company G. Schirmer, and editor of The Musical Quarterly. An advocate of modern music, Engel wrote essays on several members of the Boston school, including George Whitefield Chadwick and Charles Martin Loeffler. According to her biographer Foster Damon, Lowell met Engel through the actress Madame Abarbanell in 1908. Engel immediately began to introduce Lowell to work in his special areas of expertise, modern French poetry and music. The poetry Lowell soon came to explore on her own, and in 1915 she published Six French Poets. Under Engel's expert tutelage, she also developed a sophisticated, continental taste for contemporary works several decades in advance of their general acceptance by American