Photographs of "Men, Women and Ghosts" by Amy Lowell, held by UNT Special Collections. The book is blue with a green spine, the title on a white label at the top framed by lines. Image 2, title page with the page on the left containing publishing information. Amy Lowell's Men, Women, and Ghosts, per her own preface, is meant to be an authentic window into the experience of WWI. It is a collection of 30 poems that had been published five times before this 1919 impression. The reprinting was made possible by electrotype. It was published in New York, but an earlier printing where the electrotype was produced occurred in Norwood, Massachusetts. In the preface Lowell discusses which poems she chose to include in the collection. She excludes “purely lyrical poems” (ix) because she is more concerned with experimenting with vers libre, or free verse that does not subscribe to standardized rhyming and metrical schemes. Lowell classifies many of her poems as “polyphonic prose” and was a forerunner of experimentation with the prose poem in English. Many of her poems in the collection have elements of prose, including “Pickthorn Manor” a story about a woman whose sweetheart is on the front lines. Lowell also constructs poems as one would a musical number, as in “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces ‘Grotesques’, For String”. There are many poems about impression and perception, including “Spring Day” and “Towns in Colour.” The collection is divided into five sections: “Figurines In Old Saxe”, “Bronze Tablets” (which Lowell sees as being most directly about war), “War Pictures”, “The Overgrown Pasture”, and “Clocks Tick a Century”. The multiple printings of this collection, and the production of electrotype plates to make reprinting easy, hint that this was a widely-read collection of poetry. UNT’s copy itself also shows signs that it was given as a gift: there is a Christmas card to “Dear Florence” tucked away in the volume. Lowell’s experimentation with free verse and her aim for a depiction of what life was like for women and men during WWI was most likely a success in her contemporary moment.
