Amy Lowell

A Momentons Coming Event

Miss Amy Lowell's great Life of John Keats* is about to appear. I call it a great life, having read a large part of it and found it human, beautifully written, a combination of scholarship and readability that is exceedingly rare. I expect that it will prove as popular as it is highly praised.

The amount of work involved in the preparation of such a book as this is almost unbelievable. Only a fine executive, as Miss Lowell is, could accomplish it. It seems to me that as much energy goes into the preparation of a biography as into the founding of a business or the conduct of an important and complicated case at law. Miss Lowell has for many years been interested in the collection of Keatsiana. Her library safe holds one of the best groups of Keats manuscripts and letters in existence. She has not been content to allow any fact, however small, that it was in any way possible to obtain, to escape her, and has brought unusual powers of detection to bear in discovering, and as unusual powers of understanding in interpreting. Recently, in New York City for a brief rest, during the course of which she lectured at Columbia University, she seemed a trifle tired. Small wonder! Visualize if you can the amount of physical work involved in correcting proofs and verifying quotations in a two-volume work of 600 pages.

She has not forgotten her poetry while she has been preparing what will probably prove to be one of the most important biographies ever written by an American, and while she accepted invitations to lecture before various societies of scholars and laymen in England this spring. During the years in which she was writing her life of Keats, she wrote many poems; in fact, a collection of these will be published this autumn; and there are her well-known Yankee dialect sketches, one of which, in spite of its verse form, Edward J. O'Brien lists among the fine short stories of the year. These sketches will some day be collected in a volume. It was during this time, too, that she perpetrated her literary hoax, a la her famous ancestor, and fooled the public for many months with A Critical Fable, published first anonymously, finally acknowledged. The Sonnets to Duse should not be forgotten; they were a glowing tribute to a great genius and a friend.

The publication of the Amy Lowell Keats will be one of the momentous literary events of years.

T. F.

* LIFE OF JOHN KEATS--Amy Lowell--Houghton Miffiin (2 vols. $10.00). The book is scheduled to appear in February.