What's O'Clock
by Amy Lowell
Summary
What's O'Clock appeared in 1925, published just after Amy Lowell's death that May, and it gathers work from across the final phase of her career into a single volume that ranges from short, sharply observed Imagist miniatures to longer historical and dramatic pieces. Lowell had spent more than a decade championing Imagism and free verse against a more conservative literary establishment, and the collection shows her still working across the range of forms she had helped popularize, including what she called polyphonic prose, poems arranged with the rhythm and cadence of verse but printed as continuous prose lines rather than broken into conventional stanzas.
The collection's best known individual poem, Lilacs, takes the flowering shrub as an emblem of New England itself, moving through its color, scent and seasonal return in the kind of dense, sensory catalogue that marks Lowell's mature Imagist style, and the poem was singled out by the critic Louis Untermeyer as a particular achievement of the book. Elsewhere the collection turns to gardens, historical subjects and the lives and constraints of women artists, giving the book a wider social and historical range than a purely descriptive Imagist collection might carry, even as Lowell's attention to color, visual precision and the physical texture of a scene stays constant throughout.
Read across its full length, What's O'Clock functions as something close to a summary statement of the modernist program Lowell had spent a career defending, gathered together only after she could no longer defend it herself. It suits a reader curious about American Imagism at the point it had matured past its earliest, most austere experiments, and about a poet equally interested in sharp visual description and in the historical and social position of women artists.
Historical Context & Significance
Amy Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 12, 1925, at age fifty one, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock was awarded to her the following year, the only posthumous win in this stretch of the prize's history.
Lowell had spent the 1910s and early 1920s as one of the most visible and combative advocates for Imagism and free verse in American letters, editing anthologies and lecturing widely in defense of modernist technique against a literary establishment that largely preferred traditional meter and rhyme. Born into the prominent Boston Brahmin family that also produced the astronomer Percival Lowell and Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell, she came to poetry relatively late, beginning to write seriously only around age twenty eight after seeing the Italian actress Eleonora Duse perform in Europe.