Lady of the Moon

On a rainy day sometime before the 1920s began, the poet Amy Lowell was electric with joy. It wasn’t just the beauty of the rain or the umbrellas blooming open along the sidewalk that made her feel so warm; it was also the woman walking beside her, who had to lean close so both could fit under their parasol. That woman was Ada Dwyer Russell, the actress Lowell had fallen in love with seven years earlier, and who she had finally convinced to live with her. The rainy-day walk was quotidian, yet for Lowell, it was also special, in the way the most mundane moments with a beloved can be. “That sputter of rain, flipping the hedge-rows / And making the highways hiss, / How I love it!” she wrote in “A Shower,” a poem from her collection, Pictures of the Floating World (1919). “And,” she continued, “the touch of you upon my arm / As you press against me that my umbrella / May cover you.” In those few simple lines, Lowell evokes a tender and commonplace moment, even as she was unable to disclose the nature of her intimacy in an America not yet ready to accept an openly lesbian writer.

She met Russell in Boston in 1909, when the actress came there to perform. Three years later, when Russell returned to star in a different play, they became intimate, and—after two years of Lowell imploring Russell to live with her and Russell repeatedly saying she wasn’t ready—the women moved in together. Russell remained by the poet’s side until Lowell’s death in a social arrangement known as a “Boston marriage,” whereby women lived together, often under the heterosexist assumption that such women could only be close friends or intellectual companions rather than a queer couple. “A Shower,” like many of Lowell’s poems, has no obvious gender markers or names, yet anyone who knew Lowell—and she was well-known, indeed—could have solved the riddle of her companion’s identity. For both women, even a walk in the rain took on shades of complication and danger, all the more so because Lowell’s poetry was luminous with longing for her lover.

Lowell was no stranger to complication. By the time she died in 1925, at age 51, she was arguably the most successful yet scorned woman in American poetry. In part, this stemmed from her wide-ranging promotional tours and prolific output: in 13 years she published six volumes of poems, a multivolume biography of Keats, literary criticism, and an array of articles. Both her poetry and her criticism topped bestseller lists. Even after her death, her list of accolades lengthened; What’s O’Clock, her first posthumous book, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926.

Her success brought out venomous ire in critics and other poets. Both her body of work and her body itself—she was overweight, partly due to a glandular condition, and sometimes dressed in gender-neutral, or even stereotypical masculine, attire—were frequent targets of vitriol, particularly by men. In life, and for decades after her death, critics body-shamed her five-foot, two-hundred-pounds-plus frame. The critic Witter Byner branded her a “hippopoetess.” Ezra Pound, her most persistent poet-critic, couldn’t leave her alone. When Lowell began to adopt the strictures of Imagist verse, Pound felt she was attempting—poorly—to wrest control of the movement from him. Worse yet, her books sold well; in retaliation, he dubbed her poetic aesthetic “Amygism.” T.S. Eliot, too, snubbed her. From 1912 on, Lowell toured America as a kind of poetry evangelist, giving lectures and working indefatigably to promote Imagist verse; this prompted Eliot to dub her the “demon saleswoman” of poetry, a swipe that suggested her superhuman work ethic but also invoked a misogynist tradition that associated women with devils. The title implied, too, that all Lowell did was sell poetry, rather than compose meaningful literature.

When the invective wasn’t from critics, it came from Lowell herself. “A walking sideshow,” she once declared herself, according to the critic Louis Untermeyer. In the uncertain days before Russell accepted Lowell’s proposal to live together, Lowell see-sawed between yearning to put herself in Russell’s company and regret that she had flung herself too hard at the actress; consequently, Lowell lambasted herself in poems, such as “A Blockhead,” in which—aside from the insult in the title—she bemoans her “too hasty hand” in seeking out Russell. Portraying herself as a “monk,” she writes that she has “[d]runk bubbled wine in goblets of desire,” but now, due to that hasty ungainliness of hand, “[s]pilt is that liquor.” She acted too precipitously and “[t]hrew down that cup, and did not understand,” until that delightful wine was pooled on the floor. Desire, she has learned, can be as dizzying in its richness as it can be dangerous and destructive.

Critics’ cruel words fueled the fire of Lowell’s self-loathing. She was often in emotional pain, even as she tried to wear the mask of a smile. In “Aliens,” she muses:

The chatter of little people
Breaks on my purpose
Like the water-drops which slowly wear the rocks to powder.
And while I laugh
My spirit crumbles at their teasing touch.

Though she dismisses the attacks as “chatter” from “little people,” they slowly wear her down, like the drip from a cave eating at the rock below. The opinions of outsiders, or “aliens,” invade her, until she is too hurt to take even a “teasing touch” without “crumbling.” Lowell reveals herself to be vulnerable, as much an exquisite poet of desire as one of pain.

***

When I was a tween, I began writing poems about girls in love. I was always one such girl, even though everyone called me a boy. I imagined holding another girl’s hand as we did things both fantastical and mundane: bathing in rivers, our bodies leaning against black rocks flecked with river snails, the gurgle all around us; exploring the green-yellow bamboo groves in the razor grass fields near my home; playing video games; rocketing off together on starships. I didn’t fully understand what my poems meant. My mother called me her son and my first girlfriends called me their boyfriend, yet I knew, without question, that this felt wrong, dissonant. I wanted, instead, for everyone to see the girl of my poems as who I was, both outside and in.

But, like Lowell, I was terrified of anyone learning about my desires. I lived in Dominica, where the idea of two women or men in love was sacrilegious, to say nothing of the idea of transitioning. People like me were casual objects of scorn in the dancehall music we played; words for queer men—buller, boggerah, and batty bwoy—were the insults tossed around most. Evangelicals on the radio talked about the scourge of homosexuality and the hell that awaited us; queerness, certain of my more radical acquaintances declared, was something white European colonists invented, not something Africans had ever done. They saw it as little more than an insidious attempt to “emasculate” or pervert those of us who were Black or brown. To top it off, in 2014, our prime minister vowed that “we will never accept same-sex marriage” in Dominica. As a result, living out the things I wrote and dreamed about seemed impossible, absurd. Queerness felt incompatible with my cultural identity. Like Lowell, I lived my truest life on the page; in public, I pretended to be macho and straight, so as to keep people off my trail and avoid blows from words and fists. I read queer texts in secret—Carmilla, Fun Home, lesbian fanfics, online stories of transitioning—all the while wondering how it was possible to write so openly about such things.

In my late twenties, after nearly committing suicide out of despair at living what felt like a lie, I finally came out as trans. I decided to stay in America, where I could at least be myself, even if it meant losing my old home. I found more queer artists whose need to hide their identities I understood, writers such as Elizabeth Bishop, whose work I fell in love with—but Lowell always felt special. The first time I read her, years after coming out, I was blown away by the nakedness of her queer desire in an era of enforced suppression that recalled the restrictive world in which I grew up. And I understood what she captured most of all: the lunar tug of one person to another. I read her over and over. Even now, she still amazes me.

***

Queerness is interwoven through Lowell’s poetry, but many of her early reviewers (and even some in the decades after her death) missed or ignored it—ironic, given how many of Lowell’s poems were written for Russell. A notable exception was the critic Lillian Faderman, who wrote that Lowell produced “the most explicit (as well as eloquent and elegant) lesbian love poetry to have been written between the time of Sappho and the 1970s.”

In “A Lady,” published in 1914 in Poetry, Lowell describes a woman—possibly older and distinguished, as per the “lady” of her title—whom she admires, and, it seems, may desire. The lines are blunt:

You are beautiful and faded,
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
[…]
 
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice jars.
[…]
 
My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust
That its sparkle may amuse you.

The unnamed subject intoxicates the speaker, who “grow[s] mad with gazing” at the titular lady too long. The lady’s body may appear “faded,” but she is rich with other things: color, ambrosial fragrances, and an old-world charm like that harpsichord song. That the speaker is implicitly younger reflects Lowell’s own relationship with Russell, who was 11 years Lowell’s senior. Cowed, the speaker describes her “vigor” as a penny, which she casts at the lady’s feet, as if hoping for her attention. Only if one is committed to the heterosexist conceit of the speaker as male can a reader miss the lesbian overtones of the work, but Lowell evaded controversy by not gendering the speaker.

This is also the case in “The Blue Scarf,” one of my favorite poems, which is similarly direct in its yearning for a woman. The speaker finds a scarf, “[w]arm from a woman’s soft shoulders.” “Where is she,” Lowell writes, “the woman who wore it? The scent of her lingers and drugs me. / A languor, fire-shotted, runs through me, and I crush the scarf down on my face, / And gulp in the warmth and the blueness, and my eyes swim in cool-tinted heavens.” Intoxicated by the experience, Lowell imagines a decadent garden with “columns of marble,” and writes that

The west wind has lifted a scarf
On the seat close beside me; the blue of it is a violent outrage of colour.
She draws it more closely about her, and it ripples beneath her slight stirring.
Her kisses are sharp buds of fire; and I burn back against her, a jewel
Hard and white, a stalked, flaming flower; till I break to a handful of cinders
And open my eyes to the scarf, shining blue in the afternoon sunshine.
 
How loud clocks can tick when a room is empty, and one is alone!

The poem amasses vision upon vision, and ends with a twist: the speaker imagines a woman’s fiery kisses, and more, until she is burned away by the sheer heat of the encounter and wakes alone in an empty room. The poem clearly conveys romantic craving for another woman. But because it resolves into a dream of sorts at the end and the speaker isn’t identified as Lowell, the poet was able to encode her lesbianism while still dodging anti-queer criticism.

“The lady of the moon,” Lowell lovingly called Russell. (The many lunar references in Lowell’s work often refer at least partly to Russell.) And a moon she was, drawing the sea of Lowell’s work and inspiring one of her most desire-laden poems, “Absence,” which was dedicated to Russell. It captures the thrilling, thrumming, yet sometimes unnerving return of a partner who has been away for a while:

My cup is empty to-night.
Cold and dry are its sides
[…]
But the cup of the heart is still,
And cold, and empty.
 
When you come it brims
Red and trembling with blood,
Heart’s blood for your drinking;
To fill your mouth with love
And the bitter-sweet taste of a soul.

Without Russell, Lowell appears lost, out of place, like a shipwreck in a desert; when Russell returns, so, too, does a sense of life and purpose. Yet the last line complicates things. The word “bitter-sweet” is important. If, at times, Lowell’s language feels as melodramatic as certain romance novels, she rises above the tropes of that genre by the power and concreteness of her imagery, and especially by the complexity of that final image of ambivalence. When Russell does return, it will be lovely, Lowell suggests, but it may also be painful, for their relationship is imperfect, at once out in the open and yet necessarily surreptitious, in an era unwelcoming to queerness. This nuance is key. Love, after all, is both shadow and light; it cannot exist as only one or the other, just as nothing, really, can exist without both. Lowell understands this, and her final line resists being doggerel by virtue of this understanding.

She reveals herself here to be a poet of chiaroscuro, as familiar with spots of light as with the night’s deep pools.

***

The year 1913 changed Lowell. She read a number of poems by Hilda Doolittle, who signed her works “H.D., Imagiste,” and recognized a kindred aesthetic. Lowell had already begun to experiment with what she termed “unrhymed cadence,” a non-metrical, polyphonic form that felt lyric, despite its defiance of the traditions of lyric poetry; H.D.’s work was a revelation. Imagism was a new movement that sought a direct, image-driven, concrete form of poetry, and Lowell quickly set out to learn more about its practitioners. Pound was the sun the Imagists orbited, so she traveled to London in search of him, meeting a variety of writers, artists, and performers along the way, including Henry James and John Gould Fletcher (who became famous under Lowell’s temporary tutelage for his innovative unrhymed cadence). Lowell contributed poems to a revolutionary annual anthology of Imagist poetry and spread the gospel of this new movement. Upon her return to the United States, she embarked on campaigns to teach audiences across the country about it.

Aside from avoiding conventional meter and rhyme, Pound’s brand of Imagism was often spare and intensely sensory. This combination partly arose from his fascination with ukiyo-e, or Japanese woodblock prints, as well as with the short Japanese form of haiku; Pound aimed for simple, direct images, and austere white space punctuated, suddenly, by bright, unexpected, and concrete detail.

In 1914, Pound briefly abandoned both Imagism and the editorship of the Imagist anthology to which Lowell had submitted work. In his absence, Lowell took up the mantle of editor, which created an internecine schism: the vocal sect of writers who disliked Pound were glad to be rid of him, while Pound “loyalists” balked at Lowell’s attempt to supplant him. Regardless of this political-poetic turmoil, she set to work on the following year’s volume. In 1915, she wrote an introduction that set down a numbered list of what she believed were the principles of Imagism:

1. To use the language of common speech.... 2. To create new rhythms…. 3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject…. 4. To present an image…. 5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite. 6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

The kind of poetry Lowell advocated was perhaps best evinced by Pound’s striking two-line poem from 1913, “In a Station of the Metro,” which conjured, haiku-like, quick, vivid evocations: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” The poem features a sharp, clear image in its second line, while employing simple language throughout to evoke a sudden sensation. Increasingly influenced by Japanese, and, later, Chinese poetry and art, Lowell crafted similarly structured poems, such as “Ephemera” (1917), which, like Pound’s, equates an image with an idea: “Silver-green lanterns tossing among windy branches: / So an old man thinks / Of the loves of his youth.” The two-line “A Lover” contains a comparable blend of visuality and succinctness: “If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly / I could see to write you a letter.” 

What distinguishes both poems, and Lowell’s art more broadly, is how she braids the tenets of Imagism with queer desire. This technique appears, too, in “In a Garden,” which is rich with concrete imagery and suggestive, even lustful lines. Its first word, “gushing,” implies the force of desire in the work. The many images of water seem sexually charged: “throbbing,” “gurgling and running,” and, perhaps, the “deep, cool murmur” water makes in the night. The imagery is fluid and forceful, yet nonetheless gentle. Then the poem shifts into explicit yenning for her beloved: “And I wished for night and you. / I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool, / White and shining in the silver-flecked water.” The “moon rode over the garden,” she writes. Given Lowell’s nickname for Russell, and classical Western associations of moons with femininity, the lunar reference suggests that Russell is the poem’s subject, body illuminated, sensually, by the “white” light she shines. “In a Garden” has an air of fantasy, with Lowell imagining a beautiful, decadent scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. But the poem’s luxuriant imagery and palpable desire link it to the core tenets of Imagism and, specifically, to Lowell’s brand thereof, which fused evocative language with an oceanic longing.

In some ways, she really was performing Amygism, but not in the mocking way Pound meant; instead, I think of “Amygism” as her startlingly beautiful, subjective, sensuous version of Imagism, its heart-lanterns ablaze. She put Imagist techniques in service of a queer erotics, reveling, despite her history of being shamed, in the simple but vast beauty of one woman pining for another.

***

Lowell’s relationship with Russell may forever remain mysterious. Near the end of her life, plagued by ever-worsening health, Lowell instructed her lover to destroy their correspondence and drafts of her work. Russell obliged. Consequently, Lowell’s most explicit declarations of love were likely lost, though Russell released some unpublished pieces by Lowell after the poet’s death. (Russell died in 1952.)

Yet it’s possible that Lowell’s correspondence would have simply revealed what was already in her poems. Nearly a century after her death, I still feel the lust in her words, and still recognize, one queer woman to another, the shifting shades of desire she captures so aptly. Compared to queer writers who came after, Lowell perhaps seems tame now—yet I find myself reading her frequently because I know so deeply how it is to live in secret. She speaks to those of us who remember how cramped the closet feels—and, too, to those of us who still decide to write bravely from there anyway. It has become the norm in America to fear that conservative politicians will try to roll back anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people or will try, even, to “erase” trans people from legal existence altogether. I feel a renewed urgency in returning to queer writers who lived in times and places where queerness was the love that dare not speak its name. Lowell’s work has a renewed relevance, for which I am both happy and sad.

Above all, I understand her. Desire has numerous hues, and Lowell’s writing captured many: a quiet, twilight wanting; the deep nostalgia of people who stare at the ocean, hoping for ships; the whirling obsession of maelstroms; a hair-pulling need for another. So many decades after her death, she still speaks to me, a trans girl who grew up in a world like and utterly unlike Lowell’s own. That alone is testament to her simple and abiding power.