AMY LOWELL

The death of a man or woman of genius must always appear in the light of a spiritual catastrophe, national to the country whose artistic potentialities are reduced by the loss, acutely personal to the immediate circle from which the individual has been withdrawn. Amy Lowell is dead. In her death American literature, undistinguished save for its pitiful cleavage to the dust of mediocrity, has lost one of its few bright lights of promise; and the thought of New England, and particularly of the University, has been deprived of an intellect whose power and originality were of a peculiarly rare and precious sort.

Nothing can now be said of Amy Lowell as a poet or as an artist. It must be left to the critics of another era to do that justice to her work of which the present generation, its judgment clouded by affectionate recollection, is incapable. At the moment, there can be no feeling but a consciousness of universal loss; no coherent appreciation but a record of the passing of a personality which has in death bequeathed an everlasting heritage of truth and strength to the unwritten pages of English literature.