T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell: Love and Religion in Modernist Poetry
This essay examines the poetic styles of T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell — two modernist poets with surprisingly similar backgrounds but strikingly different methods — by focusing on their treatments of love and religion. Through close readings of Lowell's "Madonna of the Evening Flowers" and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the paper argues that both poets respond to Ezra Pound's call to "make it new" in distinct ways: Lowell through restrained Imagist minimalism that conceals a lesbian love poem beneath religious imagery, and Eliot through satirical distance and collage-like allusiveness. The essay concludes that Lowell's approach, though less celebrated, may ultimately be the more daring of the two.
- Shared Backgrounds, Divergent Styles: Eliot and Lowell's common roots and Pound's influence
- Amy Lowell and the Imagist Defense of Free Verse: Lowell's advocacy for vers libre and Imagism
- Love and Religious Imagery in 'Madonna of the Evening Flowers': Close reading of Lowell's layered love and religion
- Satire and Erotic Frustration in Prufrock: Eliot's comic distance and Prufrock's romantic failure
- Collage, Allusion, and the Modern Mind: Eliot's fragmentary allusiveness versus Lowell's minimalism
- Comparing the Two Poems: Masks, Restraint, and Hidden Truth: Lowell's hidden lesbian subtext as the bolder achievement
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay opens with a striking observation — that two apparently dissimilar poets share significant biographical and literary common ground — immediately earning the reader's attention and establishing a clear comparative thesis.
- Close reading is handled with precision: the analysis moves line by line through both poems, pointing to specific word choices (e.g., "cool, like silver," "Canterbury bells") and explaining their dual religious and romantic functions without over-interpreting.
- The biographical revelation about Lowell's poem being addressed to a woman is held back until the conclusion, giving the essay a satisfying argumentative payoff that reframes everything discussed earlier.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates sustained comparative close reading: rather than summarizing each poet separately, it builds a dialectical argument — using each poem to illuminate the other — and integrates secondary scholarly sources (Beach, Ricks, Korg) as interpretive lenses rather than mere background information. This keeps the analysis grounded in the primary texts while situating it within a broader critical conversation.
Structure breakdown
The essay moves from biographical context (Eliot, Lowell, and Pound) to Lowell's poetics and a stanza-by-stanza reading of "Madonna of the Evening Flowers," then pivots to Eliot's "Prufrock" for a parallel analysis. A final comparative section weighs both approaches against each other and delivers the essay's strongest claim: that Lowell's minimalism, once its biographical subtext is understood, represents the more courageous artistic achievement of the two.
Shared Backgrounds, Divergent Styles
The poetic styles of T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell are so dissimilar that it comes as something of a shock to realize how much the two poets had in common. Each came from a prominent Boston family and was related to a President of Harvard University — Eliot was a distant relation to Harvard's President Eliot and attended Harvard as an undergraduate; Amy Lowell's brother would become President of Harvard in the very year that T.S. Eliot graduated. Meanwhile, the poetic careers of both Eliot and Lowell were influenced by Ezra Pound: Pound famously edited Eliot's The Waste Land, which is dedicated to him. But Pound had earlier been an artistic ally of Amy Lowell, and the two had together been part of a loose poetic movement around the time of the First World War called Imagism. Their quarrel over the direction this movement would take is, according to Christopher Beach, the primary reason why we do not associate Amy Lowell with T.S. Eliot, despite their similar backgrounds:
Pound accused Lowell of stealing the movement from him and of watering down the term "Imagist" by including poets whose work failed to adhere to the movement's principles. From that point on, Pound and Lowell were to remain literary enemies. While Pound scornfully derided Lowell's brand of poetry as "Amygism," Lowell refused to support either the journals with which Pound was involved or the writers with whom he was associated, including such important modernists as James Joyce and Eliot. (Beach 77)
In Beach's telling, Lowell belonged to a slightly older generation than both Pound and Eliot, and "lack[ed] Pound's desire to remain on the cutting edge of literary vanguardism at all costs" (Beach 77). This explains the dissimilarity in styles, but a century after these literary quarrels, it is possible to examine Lowell and Eliot and see a certain affinity in their poems — one that might possibly have attracted the collaborative attentions of a great enthusiast like Pound at different points in time. By examining the treatment of love — both human and divine — in each of these poets, we can see how Lowell and Eliot frequently use different poetic means to achieve similar effects. Both poets were trying to live up to Ezra Pound's injunction that poets should "make it new": the ways in which they each individually handle two of the most familiar poetic subjects, love and religion, can show us that they achieved their originality in different ways.
Amy Lowell and the Imagist Defense of Free Verse
Amy Lowell's poetry is quite obviously intended to break with formalism. Jacob Korg notes that her articles and lectures were intended "to forward the Imagist cause in America by lecturing on 'the new poetry,' and defending vers libre or 'cadenced verse'" (Korg 134). It may strike a contemporary reader as surprising that a new poetic movement in America at the time of World War One would think it necessary to "defend vers libre," or free verse. To a certain extent, Lowell's movement was successful, insofar as nowadays "vers libre" — unrhymed poetry with varying line lengths — is the generalized convention for what poets are imagined to do, rather than formal rhymed poetry like sonnets.
It seems particularly surprising given that the most famous American poet of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman, wrote almost exclusively in vers libre. But Whitman may be the very reason why Lowell thought that free verse required defending: Whitman may have been original, and could not have been anything other than American, but he was not precisely respectable. This is not to say that Amy Lowell's poetry is not intended, on some level, to be shocking in the way that all great art can be shocking — but her way of approaching novelty is not the Whitmanic mode of the "barbaric yawp."
Works Cited
Beach, Christopher. The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.
Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2: 1865 to the Present. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.
Korg, Jacob. "Imagism." In A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. Ed. Neil Roberts. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Print.
Lowell, Amy. "Madonna of the Evening Flowers." In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2: 1865 to the Present. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.
Ricks, Christopher. T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Print.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930. New York: Farrar Straus, 1931. Print.
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