Amy Lowell--a patrician--a radical--her education--her years of preparation--vigour and versatility--definitions of free verse and of poetry--Whitman's influence--the imagists--_Patterns_--her first book--her rapid improvement--sword blades--her gift in narrative--polyphonic prose--Anna Hempstead Branch--her dramatic power--domestic poems--tranquil meditation--an orthodox poet--Edgar Lee Masters--his education--Greek inspiration--a lawyer--_Reedy's Mirror_--the _Anthology_--power of the past--mental vigour--similarity and variety--irony and sarcasm--passion for truth--accentuation of ugliness--analysis--a masterpiece of cynicism--an ideal side--the dramatic monologue--defects and limitations--Louis Untermeyer--his youth--the question of beauty--three characteristics--a gust of life--_Still Life_--old maids--burlesques and parodies--the newspaper humourists--F. P. A.--his two books--his influence on English composition. Among the many American women who are writing verse in the twentieth century, two stand out--Amy Lowell and Anna Branch. And indeed I can think of no woman in the history of our poetry who has surpassed them. Both are bone-bred New Englanders. No other resemblance occurs to me. It is interesting that a cosmopolitan radical like Amy Lowell should belong ancestrally so exclusively to Massachusetts, and to so distinguished a family. She is a born patrician, and a reborn Liberal. James Russell Lowell was a cousin of Miss Lowell's grandfather, and her maternal grandfather, Abbott Lawrence, was also Minister to England. Her eldest brother, nineteen years older than she, was the late Percival Lowell, a scientific astronomer with a poetic imagination; he was one of the most interesting and charming personalities I ever knew. His constant encouragement and example were powerful formative influences in his sister's development. Another brother is the President of Harvard, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, through whose dignified, penetrating, sensible, authoritative speeches and writings breathes the old Massachusetts love of liberty.