As the Library's Bicentennial year draws to a close, the Bulletin takes a look at a poem written in the Library's honor 78 years ago.
In December 1922 the Literary Digest International Book Review published Amy Lowell's "The Congressional Library." The poem found no response with readers. Indeed, the only letter to the editor mentioning it was from Lowell herself, who pointed out in the January 1923 issue that the typesetter had transposed pages two and three of her manuscript "to the utter confusion of the poem." The editor accommodated Lowell by reprinting her work in its correct form.
Lowell, far from being the proverbially poor poet, was born in 1874 into a distinguished Massachusetts family and received the best education available to women in the 19th century. Other prominent Lowells include her first cousin, the aristocratic poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), her brother Percival (1855-1916), who left his mark as an astronomer, and her cousin-poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977).
Until her death in 1925, Amy Lowell was also a noted essayist and biographer. Her first poems had been conventional. But joining the Imagist school of poet Ezra Pound, she soon became one of its leading proponents, together with Hilda Doolittle, William Butler Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington and John Gould Fletcher.
Pound had played on Amy Lowell's poetic aspirations, received generous subsidies and treated her cruelly. However, the American public, always hungry for sensation, knew Amy Lowell more for her eccentric ways, Cuban cigars and corpulence. She stayed up all night and slept till the afternoon. She employed three maids, a butler, eight gardeners, two chauffeurs, a footman and two secretaries. Once a week, a man reported to her home to wind the mansion clocks. She knew how to stay in the public eye, promoting herself through lectures, public readings and interviews. She was very rich, and she was famous.
Her magnum opus completed shortly before her death, a two-volume biography of Keats, ran to 1,300 pages. The honor that eluded her in life came a year after death when the Pulitzer Prize Committee acknowledged her collection of short lyrics, What's O'Clock.
As to Lowell's "The Congressional Library," initially one is struck by the graphic word picture called a "decoration" in the journal's table of contents that accompanied the poem. Looming over the dome of the Thomas Jefferson Building, a woman with angel's wings and cape holds a large book and a giant quill. A mass of people stream below her, fill the Library plaza and mount the Library's granite stairs. Still others rise from a mountain valley on the horizon and emerge from a field shoulder-high with plants and flowers. Barely discernible is the artist's name, L. Soderston.
This almost nebulous mass seems to represent all mankind. A Mexican sombrero, an Asian straw hat, a cowboy hat, laborers' headgear and hats seen on American streets give the only clues to national identities. She writes:
We, the people without a race,
Without a language;
Of all races and of none;
Of all tongues, and one imposed;
Of all traditions and all pasts.
With no traditions and no past.
A patchwork and an altar-piece,
Vague as a sea-mist . . .
Lowell describes the Library with its marbles "all mounting, spearing, flying into colour … a dome and a dome, a balcony and a balcony." She summarizes the symbolism of the multihued marble with three words: "This is America" and describes it as a "vast, confused beauty."
With unusual imagery, she then compares the contents of the Library to a strange beast with blood and viscera that comes alive at night: "But behind the vari-coloured hall?/The entrails, the belly,/The blood-run veins, the heart, the viscera." The mute voices of dead poets and writers soon echo. "These are the voices of the furious dead who never die."
In the final stanza, she looks beyond the ages when the Library will be no more and civilization is destroyed. But even in this vision of "white columns thrown and scattered/Our dome of colours striped with the crawling of insects/Spotted with the thrust of damp clay–" she sees life once more stirring so that it will "become the blood and heat … which forever whips … the static present …"
Not much is known of the poem's source of inspiration. No doubt Amy Lowell had toured the Library and been impressed by its art and architecture. In a letter to Professor Paul Kaufman of American University (March 29, 1923), she wrote that the Library should be seen as a symbol of America:
"I was not observing the Library from an architectural standpoint, nor was it the reading room that I referred to. It was the main hall with its tiers of balconies and its bright coloured marbles. The confusion and brilliance of the whole, from floor to roof, are, I think, very typical of America. I did not intend "wine-blues" to carry any emotional meaning; I was referring to colour. Have you forgotten the 'wine-dark' ocean of Homer?"
An anonymous critic once wrote of Lowell: "There has never lived a woman poet of such range, versatility and power. She reminds one of Byron or Browning. I am convinced that future time will find in her one of the literary giants of our time … She is a great poet."
