Amy Lowell (1874–1925) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, into one of the state's wealthiest families, whose members had played prominent roles in public life since the American Revolution. Their status was immortalized in the 1910 doggerel, "And this is good old Boston, / The home of the bean and the cod, / Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots, / And the Cabots talk only to God." The Lowell men attended Harvard and then went on to run or found businesses or major institutions. The Lowell women raised children and had roles in the social and philanthropic life of Boston. While Amy Lowell understood the importance of being a Lowell, temperamentally she was miscast for the role assigned her by gender. She wanted an independent life, which fortunately she had the money to achieve.

Lowell's desire to contribute to public life found its outlet when, at the age of thirty-eight, she launched her public literary career by publishing her poetry in A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass. She soon adopted the Imagist style, becoming its chief spokesperson. The Imagists sought to create poems free of "authorial intervention," ones that presented precisely observed sensory experiences and left to the reader the interpretation of those experiences. Lowell greatly admired the poet John Keats and wrote a massive two-volume biography of him during the 1920s. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry posthumously in 1926 for What's O'Clock (1925). Her other works include Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914); Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916); Can Grande's Castle (1918); Pictures of the Floating World (1919); and Legends (1921).