archive

The Amy Lowell Letters Project: Digitizing a Career in Poetry

The Amy Lowell Letters Project (ALLP) is an open-access, digital scholarly edition of the letters of American poet, editor, and critic Amy Lowell (1874–1925). Lowell corresponded with virtually all the most prominent writers and publishers of her time, but no representative collection of her letters exists. ALLP demonstrates the centrality of her role in the development and dissemination of a controversial experimental poetics. Her letters reveal the labor we take for granted as we encounter poems in volumes and periodicals, the seemingly endless chain of queries, submissions, rejections, revisions, and financial transactions that bridge artistic creation and public consumption.

In this session, Melissa Bradshaw will discuss the process of developing the prototype for an archive that is searchable chronologically, thematically, and by recipient, with the long-term goal of aggregating metadata from similarly digitized correspondences of poets, editors, and publishers Lowell worked with, in order to recreate the conversations that subtend modern poetry.