A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912) is a poetry collection by Amy Lowell. Published at the beginning of her career as an influential imagist devoted to classical poetic themes and forms, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass is an agile and promising work from a pioneering poet of the early twentieth century. Containing lyric poems, sonnets, verses for children, and a masterful long poem, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass is a vibrant collection from an emerging poet who would come to define the imagist movement throughout her storied career. In poems like “Azure and Gold,” Lowell displays natural imagery intertwined with the play of words, producing such stanzas as “April had covered the hills / With flickering yellows and reds, / The sparkle and coolness of snow / Was blown from the mountain beds.” From the drama inherent to seasonal change, she extracts a revelation from “the song of birds, / Who, swinging unseen under leaves, / Made music more eager than words.” In “The Boston Athenaeum,” a masterful long poem on one of the oldest libraries in the United States, she recalls “Long, peaceful hours seated on the floor / Of some retired nook, all lined with books, / Where reverie and quiet reign supreme!” Personal and public, keenly engaged with tradition while maintaining her own private voice, Lowell’s poems are an essential contribution to one of humanity’s oldest art forms. This edition Amy Lowell’s A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.
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Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was an American poet. Born into an elite family of businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals, Lowell was a member of the so-called Boston Brahmin class. She excelled in school from a young age and developed a habit for reading and book collecting. Denied the opportunity to attend college by her family, Lowell traveled extensively in her twenties and turned to poetry in 1902. While in England with her lover Ada Dwyer Russell, she met American poet Ezra Pound, whose influence as an imagist and fierce critic of Lowell’s work would prove essential to her poetry. In 1912, only two years after publishing her first poem in The Atlantic Monthly, Lowell produced A Dome of Many-Coloured Glasses, her debut volume of poems. In addition to such collections of her own poems as Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) and Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916), Lowell published translations of 8th century Chinese poet Li Tai-po and, at the time of her death, had been working on a biography of English Romantic John Keats.
