Sword Blades and Poppy Seed

Written by Amy Lowell

Narrated by LibriVox Community

This is a volume of poems by Amy Lowell, published in 1914."Against the multitudinous array of daily verse our times produce this volume utters itself with a range and brilliancy wholly remarkable. I cannot see that Miss Lowell's use of unrhymed 'vers libre' has been surpassed in English. Read 'The Captured Goddess', 'Music', and 'The Precinct. Rochester', a piece of mastercraft in this kind. A wealth of subtleties and sympathies, gorgeously wrought, full of macabre effects (as many of the poems are) and brilliantly worked out. The things of splendor she has made she will hardly outdo in their kind." (Josephine Preston Peabody, 'The Boston Herald', 1916)

• Language: English
• Publisher: LibriVox
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014

Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was an American poet. Born into an elite family of businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals, Lowell was a member of the so-called Boston Brahmin class. She excelled in school from a young age and developed a habit for reading and book collecting. Denied the opportunity to attend college by her family, Lowell traveled extensively in her twenties and turned to poetry in 1902. While in England with her lover Ada Dwyer Russell, she met American poet Ezra Pound, whose influence as an imagist and fierce critic of Lowell’s work would prove essential to her poetry. In 1912, only two years after publishing her first poem in The Atlantic Monthly, Lowell produced A Dome of Many-Coloured Glasses, her debut volume of poems. In addition to such collections of her own poems as Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) and Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916), Lowell published translations of 8th century Chinese poet Li Tai-po and, at the time of her death, had been working on a biography of English Romantic John Keats.