Only one variant poet has been traced in Germany subsequent to World War I, a woman who wrote under the pseudonym of Iris Ira. Her volume, _Lesbos_ (1930), consists of free renderings of Sappho’s and Anacreon’s surviving fragments, and a similar rendering of the _Songs of Bilitis_, complete with introductory narrative. (Richard Dehmel had translated in the 1890s only two dozen of its prose-poems.) A translator’s preface to the volume pleads the necessity of maintaining mood rather than literal accuracy, but while the verse displays skill and grace, its tone throughout is more charming than passionate. And passion, of course, was the very essence of Louÿs’s own work. Poetry—English Poets in English offer nothing as explicitly lesbian as the work of Vivien or Madeleine, and they seldom equal Barney or Schwabe in frankness of implication. Indeed, last century’s “thick veil of ellipse and metaphor”[45] still shrouds most of our feminine variant lyrists, and even where it has thinned, critics in general have either failed or refused to penetrate it. Consequently some readers may incline to skepticism concerning already familiar material cited below, but in that case they are urged to re-examine it with open mind, not in anthologies but in the authors’ original context, and not for overt lesbianism but for clearly variant significance. In America, Amy Lowell was the first poet to venture at all openly upon variant ground. She was born three years earlier than Vivien and Barney, the granddaughter of James Russell Lowell and sister of a president of Harvard. In spite of this formidably respectable heritage, she did not escape to Paris but lived out her life in the family mansion in Brookline, though she did create within it her own particular haven. As surely as Renée Vivien felt herself born in the wrong era, Miss Lowell was born in the wrong flesh for a worshipper of female beauty. Even in her adolescent journals she bemoans the excessive weight which robbed her of appeal. Living too early for endocrinology to aid her, she tried rigid dieting, but succeeded only in doing permanent damage to her health. Something of a tomboy in her younger days, as she matured she adopted also the male psychological role. Clement Wood has documented for her as thoroughly as did Moore and Wilson for Emily Brontë this consistent assumption of masculinity, and the reader must be referred to the final chapter of his biography for detailed evidence. He lists there all Lowell’s poems written from a male viewpoint, but for the present purpose only such require mention as are love lyrics addressed to women and spoken as if by the poet in her own person, not through the lips of a fictitious man. Miss Lowell published nothing until 1912, when she was nearly thirty, but then in _A Dome of Many-Colored Glass_ she included a number of variant verses. “Hora Stellatrix,” for instance, contains the following lines: