The poem "Fireworks" by Amy Lowell is a very interesting poem. The poem reveals a relationship between two people who hate each other. It describes how, upon meeting, their arguing mimics fireworks. The imagery in “Fireworks” is some of the most colorful language of its kind that you may ever see in a single poem. Amy Lowell uses these beautiful verses to explain a flurry of internal fireworks of two confused characters in her poem. The clarity of the pictures that Lowell creates with simple combinations of words is quite astonishing. But the poem is not just an endless string of overwritten literature. The poet breaks this up by writing a few more concrete lines of imagery that are placed perfectly to make the poem sound fluent and elegant. On a deeper level, the poem contains very colorful and positive imagery while at the same time juxtaposing the stable nature of stones, such as "malachites," "jades," "copper," and "amethyst," with the changing nature of plants like "roses," "saffron," "amaranths," and "leaves" and the volatile nature of fire, evident in the usage of terms like "blazing," "sparkles," and "flaming." The speaker in Amy Lowell’s “Fireworks” then fuses both definitions of the celebratory display of lights and the emotional display of rage that human beings feel. So when the speaker meets the person she hates, her rage bursts forth like the fireworks that bursts forth on the Fourth of July celebration. When two people who hate each other find themselves in each other’s company, they may argue, they may accuse each other of all sorts of atrocities, and they may even come to fisticuffs. The term fireworks is used to express the explosion of emotion that ensues from such rage and contention. Even a dictionary definition of “fireworks” is “a display of violent temper or fierce activity.”
Thursday, 10 January 2013
Posted by Unknown at 08:48
''A Lady'' is a pictorial piece illustration of the creation of ''pure image'', a hard and clear portrait. The composition and the technique is called ''Polyphonic Verse'' which means many-voiced poem, where Lowell uses ''A New Rhythm''. Amy Lowell puts forward the ''Pure Image'' of the lady in a series of sense impressions: Sight, Sound, and Smell to make you see her. She compares the lady to ''an old opera tune played upon a harpsichord'' and ''the sun-flooded silks of an 18th century boudoir'' connotes delicateness and antiquity. Her eyes “smolder” which means they look smoky or dull, having been robbed by time of their natural brilliance or luster, like “fallen roses”. Her smell has turned “vague and suffusing”. The odor is vague to the young because young people do not understand why an old woman would smell so. It is also “suffusing” Impliedly the odor is unpleasant because it has the “pungence” of preserved spice. Her voice which has lost some of its volume is delightful to hear, seemingly her only asset. Her newly-evolved complexion looks strange so that the speaker grows “mad with gazing” at her. A picture of a small, soft spoken and delicate old woman who is beautiful. Physical description of the old lady. From reading the poem we see that visual effect or physical perception subordinates emotional experience; motion takes the place of emotion; fact informs feeling; sensory details dominate content. Something is missing: “the human heart”. Imagism is simply art for art’s sake.
Posted by Unknown at 07:27
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Amy Lowell had a long-time affair with an actress named Ada Dywer Russell, star of stage and screen. It was for and about her Lowell wrote ‘Summer Rain’. Published in January 1919. This poem centered in on the image of rain and the feelings expressed during a rainstorm Summer Rain got a very emotional response. Speaker of the poem is the author herself. It is proven because the author refers directly to herself in the poem when she states “me”. The poem starts with the description of heavy rain, which is there purposely to set a mood. It provides the reader with a new way to view rainstorms, particularly in a positive light. darkness and the rainstorm, are the subjects of this poem. It keep the readers drawn into the poem due to the detailed description of the rain. The sounds of the raindrops is described as ‘Ping’, which break the silence. Lowell is speaking of soft and happy rain, in the lines, ‘The rain rattled and clashed, And the slats of the shutters danced and glittered’. Lowell describes that the rain is continuing when she mentions “there was not a pinpoint of silence”. It provides the readers with visualizations that allow them to form their own opinions on the joy of rain. The presence of someone in her life is really meaningful, which is known because throughout the poem the word ‘You’ is used. The person is referred to as a lover, because she says, ‘And the words you whispered to me. The person whispers something special in her ears that are very essential to her. Lowell has described the presence of that person as ‘Brightness’. Lowell’s theme and purpose to the reader and allow the reader to view how rain can be a positive experience.
Posted by Unknown at 03:53
Tuesday, 8 January 2013
Lowell belonged to a wealthy Boston Brahmin caste. She studied at private school in Boston where she was known as a terror, Loud, opinionated and lacking the decorum expected of a proper young lady from a good family. When her private school education was completed she made her social debut. Lowell travelled in Europe, California and New Mexico with her family. She began writing as a young girl. . In the year 1887, at the age of 13 she published a volume of Juvenilia, Dream Drops or Stories from Fairyland to aid a charity. Despite her popularity at dinner parties she received no marriage proposals during her year as a debutante. Amy Lowell was a formidable woman—always quite heavy, she was short and square in appearance, she wore men’s suits and a pince-nez, smoked cigars and had her hair done up in a pompadour. Amy escaped to Egypt and embarked on a severely restricted diet, eating only tomatoes and asparagus in the hope of conquering her weight problem and succeeding only in damaging her health. She enjoyed the life of a Boston socialite, and travel abroad. She lived the life of a wealthy socialite. Lowell, a vivacious and outspoken businesswoman, tended to excite controversy. She was nearly 30 before she became a poet herself. Lowell published her first sonnet, "A Fixed Idea," in Atlantic Monthly in 1910. The first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later in 1912. She was deeply interested in and influenced by the Imagist movement, led by Ezra Pound. Lowell was largely neglected, in part because homophobic critics rejected her bisexual and lesbian views on human relationships until feminist criticism defended her place among early-twentieth-century poets. In the post-World War I years, Lowell, like other women writers, was largely forgotten, but with the renaissance of the women's movement in the 1970s, women's studies brought her back to light.
Posted by Unknown at 06:33
Saturday, 5 January 2013
Amy Lawrence Lowell. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts on 9th February 1874. She was the daughter of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lawrence. Her family was wealthy and prominent members of New England society. Her father was a businessman, Civic leader and horticulturalist while her mother was an accomplished musician and linguist. As a young girl she attended private school in Boston as she belonged to a wealthy family. Lowell never attended college because her family did not consider it proper, and so she started educating herself by using her father's 7000 volume library. She lived as a socialite and traveled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe. Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez. She smoked cigars constantly. Lowell was a great American poet, biographer, critic, lecturer and essayist. She wrote and published over 650 poems. In 1910 four of Lowell's sonnets were accepted for publication by the Atlantic Monthly. A Fixed Idea," published first, appeared in August of that year. By 1912 she had published her first book of poetry, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass; the title came from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais, his elegy for Keats. Lowell was said to be Lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell were reputed to be lovers. Amy's book, What's O'Clock, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, a year after her death. Lowell’s Famous Poems are Apples of Hesperides, Azure and gold, Before The Altar, Petals, Venetian Glass, Wild Little Bird, Patterns and Lilacs. Patterns was the best single poem, written in 1925. Famous Quote Lowell "Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in." Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925 at the age of 51.
Posted by Unknown at 04:06