Amy Lawrence Lowell

Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874-1925) is one of the most discussed names in early 20th-century American poetry, and an unusual figure in tobacco history. Born into Boston's storied Lowell family, the poet did not hide her cigar in an era when women smoking in the open was considered improper; the meerschaum pipes attributed to her in collections have carried her name into pipe literature as well.

Life and Poetry

She was born on 9 February 1874 in Brookline, Massachusetts, at the family's Sevenels estate, where she spent most of her life. She never attended university, educating herself instead in her father's library and among the shelves of the Boston Athenæum. Among her brothers, Percival Lowell was an astronomer and Abbott Lawrence Lowell served as president of Harvard University. She came to writing late: her first collection, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared in 1912. She soon became the American spokesperson for the Imagist movement, compiling three Imagist anthologies; once the movement's direction had taken shape under her hand, Ezra Pound dismissively called it "Amygism." She died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Sevenels on 12 May 1925, and the following year was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock. Her rare-book and manuscript collection was donated to Harvard University, and is preserved today in a room bearing her name at the Houghton Library.

Her Cigar Habit and Public Image

Lowell's cigar smoking was a fixture the press of her time never tired of. Newspapers presented her as a woman puffing large, dark cigars. According to reports, what she actually smoked was quite different: thin, mild Manila cigars from the Philippines and small panatelas. In Barbara L. Bellows's 2006 study A Talent for Living, it is noted that when Sevenels was renovated, she had a humidity-controlled storage room built dedicated solely to her cigars. Being mocked for her size, her masculine-cut clothing, and her habits did not deter her from this visibility; the nickname "hippopoetess," coined by a rival poet, is a trace of that reaction. Her name is often mentioned today in collections of famous pipe and tobacco smokers, in listings of women smokers.

The Pipe: Objects and Conflicting Accounts

The most concrete trace of her relationship to the pipe survives in objects. A meerschaum pipe exhibited in the George Arents tobacco collection at the New York Public Library is attributed to her; an article introducing the collection puts the number of pipes said to have come from the poet at as many as forty. The same account also notes that Lowell's only known habit was cigars, recording the contradiction in its own text. Reports say a meerschaum pipe attributed to the poet was also displayed at a 1983 exhibition of literary memorabilia at the Grolier Club in New York, and that the club held seven of her unsmoked Filipino cigars.

Written testimony, however, doesn't agree. Horace Gregory's 1958 biography reports that she occasionally smoked a pipe behind closed doors — after breakfast at her country house, or in bed at Sevenels. Bellows, on the other hand, writes that the pipe was too much trouble for her. In the October 1948 issue of Pipe Lovers magazine, drawing on the manager of D. P. Ehrlich, a Boston tobacconist, it's reported that Lowell chose the lightest pipes she could find and insisted on the thinnest possible mouthpiece. In her known poems, the word "pipe" appears in only two lengthy works, "The Cremona Violin" and "The Great Adventure of Max Breuck"; in both, the pipe is a prop that sets the scene. Though it's a familiar image to writings that trace meerschaum's footprint in literature, these lines are not proof of the poet's own habit. Unlike writers like J. B. Priestley, who became identified with their pipe, Lowell passes into tobacco history not with a portrait of a habitual smoker, but with a collecting question the sources have never resolved.