Amy Lawrence Lowell
Ben Rapaport, October 2024
Exclusive to pipedia.org
From John Cockburn et al., A JOURNEY over LAND, from the Gulf of Honduras to the Great SOUTH-SEA (1735): “These gentlemen gave us some seegars...these are leaves of tobacco rolled up in such a manner that they serve both for a pipe and for tobacco itself. These, the ladies, as well as gentlemen, are very fond of smoking.” Three centuries later, tobacconist Diana Silvius-Gits, a legendary Chicago tobacco retailer who passed away in 2016, is to have said: “Women who smoke cigars are an attractive, successful and sophisticated bunch who know what they want and know how to enjoy life.” When you search for famous American women who smoked, Millicent V. Fenwick (1910–1992), the New Jersey four-term, pipe-smoking Republican member of Congress, is always the first to be named. But before her there were several other famous female smokers: English writer Virginia Woolf, French novelist George Sand, German actress Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, and poet Amy Lowell, to name a few. (Read “♪Got a pipe smoking woman♪,” dutchpipesmoker.com, for others.)
Two Massachusetts poets were named Lowell: James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) of Cambridge, and on the other side of the Charles River, Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874–1925) of Boston; they were not related. He had written several poems about pipes including his most often cited, “To C. F. Bradford. On The Gift of A Meerschaum Pipe.” “The outstanding figures, George Sand and Amy Lowell, preferred cigars” (Marjorie Mears, “Raleigh Startled and Started the World with His Pipe and Tobacco,” Tobacco, August 18, 1927). (The cigarette-smoking Silvia Plath [1932–1963], another American poet, was born in Boston.)
Amy Lowell was many things: Brahmin, diva, lesbian, impresario, entrepreneur, translator, editor, critic, lecturer, poetry advocate, publicity agent, propagandist, spinster, heiress to two textile fortunes, major collector of rare books, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet—she was called “the demon saleswoman of poetry”—sister of President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard University, and savior of the Boston Athenaeum, a unique combination of library, museum, and cultural center. She did not begin her life work until she was almost 40, and waged a brilliant, militant campaign against fat phobia, against ageism, and against the stereotypes of passive female sexuality and sentimental artistic expression. She was outspoken and controversial. She had the habit of wearing men’s clothing, kept her hair in a bun, and wore pince-nez. She was a stout woman—Nidia Hernàndez (“Tributes to Amy Lowell”) described her as “inevitably masculine”—with elegant hands and feet and a light dance step. She was certainly obese, a five-foot frame that carried 250 pounds. Brooklyn-born poet and rival Witter Bynner called her a hippopoetess.
“A cigar-smoking proponent of free-verse modernism in open rebellion against her distinguished Boston lineage, Amy Lowell cut an indelible public figure” (Honor Moore, “Amy Lowell: Selected Poems,” loa.org). “A note: in 1915, Imagist poet Amy Lowell amply demonstrated that tobacco use is not male-specific by ordering 10,000 Manila cigars to see her through an anticipated wartime shortage” (Jeff Jeske, Storied Words. The Writer’s Vocabulary and Its Origins, 2004, n. p.) “Of course, we never thought of women smoking cigars—though it is said that Madame Sacher of Vienna and Amy Lowell of Boston do so—or of women smoking pipes, for we had seen that so frequently out of the brambled and unkempt by-ways of life that we never thought of it as anything attractive” (Captain Eldridge Colby, U.S.A., “Feminine Whiffs,” America, February 28, 1925).
She was never called a brazen hussy, but she sure acted like an improper woman. She drove buggies at high speed and kept her guests laughing and talking late at night. She was well known as a smoker at a time when women did not smoke, at least not in public. She smoked cigars over cigarettes, stating that cigars lasted longer even though the smoke upset others around her; she smoked them in public. “Nineteenth-century biographer and poet Amy Lowell is said to have created a scandal at Harvard when she lit up a cigar during a visit” (Jack Nicholson, “Ladies and Cigars. Aficionadas: Women and Their Cigars,” cigaraficionado.com, Summer 1995).
“’And she smoked cigars!’ Yes, she did, notably one night on shipboard years before proper women did so in public. She refused a society interview on landing in New York, the indignant journalist found a witness, and the next morning front pages all over America proclaimed that the sister of the president of Harvard smoked ‘big black’ cigars. Actually, Lowell was a delicate woman and her cigars were slender Manilas” (Honor Moore, ed., Amy Lowell. Selected Poems, 2004). “When would she light up? She seldom disappointed, although her favored stogie was, in fact, a small brown panatela and not the big black cigars featured in the more sensational reports” (Carl Rollyson, “Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography,” carlrollyson.com). “She insisted, however, that she preferred light. Manila cigars, so mild that she frequently did not offer them to her friends” (Claire Healey, “Amy Lowell Visits London,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 46, September 1973, 444). “During her renovation of Sevenels [her Brookline, Massachusetts home], Lowell had a special humidity-controlled storeroom built exclusively for her cigars. Much has been made over her unconventional habit, but cigar smoking made perfect sense for a writer. She found cigarettes burned down too quickly; all the snuffing out and relighting distracted her. Pipes proved too much trouble altogether. A chewing wad was not to be considered; snuff, too messy” (Barbara L. Bellows, A Talent for Living, 2006, 51)
“She was not above taking pleasure in defying the social convention which made smoking taboo for women; she once caused an unsuspecting young man to blush as she compared unwrapping her cigar to undressing a lady layer by layer, then lit up and inhaled seductively” (encyclopedia.com). “Often sitting on the outside of conversations Lowell was still able to hear conversations as if she was right there and that was because her cigar was imbued with her selfishness and greed to become as famous as possible” (warehouse-13-artifact-database.fandom.com).
“Amy Lowell leaned back … in a big, easy chair, puffing one of her Manila cigars. ‘I have (puff, puff,) no patience … with the new-fashioned woman (puff, puff) and her so-called rights. I believe (and here she drew deep of the cigar) in the old-fashioned, conservative woman and all her limitations. …Bellowing invitations down the stairs, urging them up to her bedroom, the poet regularly received daytime visitors while still in bed, propped up on pillows, often smoking a pipe (or a hookah, as one anecdote has it), her breakfast tray uncleared at four in the afternoon, black umbrellas on either side of her to block out the sun” (Melissa Bradshaw, Amy Lowell. Diva Poet, 2016, n. p.). “When she had guests for dinner, she did not appear until after the guests were seated and being served; then she made a dramatic entrance, welcomed by her sheep dogs. After dinner there was a certain ritual to follow—hanging light shields on lamp shades, lighting the logs in the fireplace, passing cigars and cigarettes, coffee and liqueurs and setting around glasses of water” (Daisy Leigh Crook, “Amy Lowell’s Poetry as Representative of The American Renascence,” Master of Arts thesis, August 1941, 39).
If she also enjoyed the occasional puff from a pipe, I was surprised to find only two poems with minor mention of the word pipe. These are two lines from “The Cremona Violin”:
“Is my pipe filled, my Dear?
I'll have a few Puffs and a snooze before I eat my tea.”
And from “The Great Adventure of Max Breuck”:
“The centre of the board is piled with pipes,
Slender and clean, the still unbaptized clay
Awaits its burning fate.”"Within the arbour, Mynheer Breuck, I’ll bring
Coffee and cakes, a pipe, and Father’s best
Tobacco, brought from countries harbouring
Dawn’s earliest footstep.”“Max took a pipe as graceful as the stem
Of some long tulip, crammed it full, and drew
The pungent smoke deep to his grateful lung.”
In my opinion these two examples are rather insignificant and inconsequential.
There is some evidence to indicate that she often smoked a pipe. “Cigarets had proved inadequate for Amy Lowell … and she soon discovered that a pipe burned small holes in the meticulously stretched bed clothes beneath which she wrote. Like the men in her family and the late Rudyard Kipling, she had found a good cigar was a smoke” (“On Amy Lowell,” Sylvestre C. Watkins [comp.], The Pleasures of Smoking, 1948, 182). “Amy Lowell, according to Mrs. Belmont, hated cigarettes, and on all occasions, refused to smoke them. In private, after breakfast at her country house, or in bed at Sevenels, she sometimes smoked a pipe” (Horace Gregory, Amy Lowell. Portrait of the Poet in Her Time, 1958, 40). “Amy Lowell was a wealthy and eccentric lady who smoked a pipe” (The Modern Monthly, 1934, 104). In Michael Frank’s article, he was very succinct: “Elizabeth Barrett Browning wore but (being often bedridden) seldom walked in the slippers; Dickens wrote with the inkstand; Amy Lowell smoked the pipe” (“Will Wonders Never Cease?,” The New York Times, June 21, 2002).
“The late New England poet, Amy Lowell, was an inveterate pipe smoker. Williamson [manager of D. P. Ehrlich, a Boston tobacconist] says that she was careful to buy the lightest pipes and was especially particular about her stems, insisting on the smallest possible” (S. R. Nelms, “A Dealer Tells About Young Smokers,” Pipe Lovers, October, 1948, 318). Literary memorabilia were on display at New York City’s Grolier Club in 1983. “Among the objects was a meerschaum pipe formerly puffed by Amy Lowell. …Thus Amy Lowell’s carved meerschaum underscores the originality of the aristocratic poet who owned it. She mostly smoked cigars, and the club has seven of her stogies on hand, too—unsmoked products of the Philippines” (“Relics of Literary Lives on View at Grolier Club,” The New York Times, February 25, 1983).
This is, by far, the most convincing evidence. “The front reading room at the New York Public Library was in fact designed to complement the library in Arents’ Westchester home, and was constructed in 1943 when the collection came to the Library. …There are European and American tobacco pots, rasps, drying forms, humidors, pouches, and a plethora of pipes. There is one of 40 or so meerschaum pipes once owned by the writer Amy Lowell, although she herself was only known to smoke cigars” (“A Universe of Tobacciana—The George Arents Collection,” pipesmagazine.com).
Throughout time, writers have championed the joys of nicotine addiction; many iconic authors loved the leaf in any form. Amy Lowell may not have championed the joys of nicotine addiction, but she certainly took pleasure in smoking cigars and, with ample evidence in this essay, pipes.
Remember that you read about Amy Lowell and her penchant for cigars and pipes here, not in Cigar Aficionado.