Unexpected Chords

One of the central figures of the Imagist movement, American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925) experimented with poetic language and form by turning to the musical medium. This book examines the various ways in which the concept of music relates to and shapes Lowell's poetical and critical work. In Lowell's poems, music functions not only as sonic and rhythmic material or structural model, but also as a theme, reflecting cultural and aesthetic debates of an emerging modernity, such as gender, effects of urbanization, the First World War, primitivism, and cultural validity. In her critical writings, the idea of music fosters Lowell's development of free verse, polyphonic prose, and her performative poetics. In considering Lowell's poetry and poetics through its 'medial other', this study aims at re-positioning Lowell within a Literary and Cultural Studies discourse which accounts for the intermedial nature of her Modernist aesthetics.