Amy Lowell was born into an affluent Massachusetts family and educated at home and in private schools in Boston. Her financial resources helped her develop a liberated and unconventional lifestyle.

Amy Lowellonce remarked that God had made her a businesswoman and she had made herself a poet. Over a relatively brief period she produced over 650 poems but also worked energetically to publicise and promote modern trends in poetry. In particular, she embraced imagism within the Modernist movement, and in 1914 became friends with Ezra Pound, one of its leading proponents. Lowell edited a number of collections of imagist poetry.

She published extensively between 1915 and her death in 1925. She lectured, promoted the work of other poets she admired and wrote literary criticism, including a lengthy biography of John Keats. Lowell received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1925 for her collection of poems What’s O’Clock.