Many Swans, Sun Myth of the North American Indians (Forgotten Books)

Many Swans: Sun Myth of the North American Indians by Lowell, Amy (1920).

About the Author

Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874 - 1925)
Amy Lawrence Lowell (February 9, 1874 - May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

Lowell was born into Boston's prominent Lowell family. One brother, Percival Lowell, was a famous astronomer who predicted the existence of the dwarf planet Pluto; another brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, served as President of Harvard University.

She herself never attended college because it was not deemed proper for a woman by her family, but she compensated for this with her avid reading, which led to near-obsessive book-collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe. Her first published work appeared in 1910 in Atlantic Monthly. The first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later.

Lowell was said to be lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell were reputed to be lovers. Russell was Lowell's patron. Russell was the subject of her more erotic work. The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Lowell has been linked romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence that they knew each other at all is the brief correspondence between them about a memorial for Duse that never took place.

Lowell was an imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez. She smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. A glandular problem kept her perpetua