Poetry
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed
Amy Lowell · 1914
Synopsis
In the opening poem, a discouraged poet, leaning on the parapet of a bridge one April evening, is led by an old man into his shop: this merchant of words sells sword blades to wound and poppy seed to make people dream, and his price is life. Two sections bearing these two names follow: sonnets, rhymed verse and free verse which the author calls unrhymed cadence, gardens, fabrics, a London street at night, the road to Exeter, and three pieces of a mixed form, sometimes prose, sometimes verse.
Context
The collection is published by Macmillan, in New York, in October 1914, two years after a first book of traditional make. In the meantime, its author has read in the magazine Poetry poems by Hilda Doolittle signed H.D., Imagiste, and has gone to London to see Ezra Pound. The preface, dated 19 May 1914, acknowledges a debt to the French poets, from Leconte de Lisle to Paul Fort, three of whose pieces she takes as models for form, and prefers the name cadenced verse without rhyme to that of free verse. She will go on to take the lead of the movement, which Pound, breaking away from it, renamed Amygism in mockery, after the author's first name. A Pulitzer Prize crowned a posthumous collection in 1926.
Who it is for
Some fifty pieces, to be read in portions, in which sonnets, free verse and prose mixed with verse stand side by side. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
The first of her books marked by Imagism, welcomed with enthusiasm, but judged too free by Ezra Pound.
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