American poet Amy Lowell was BOTD in 1874. Born in Boston to a prominent intellectual family, she was educated in Boston but did not attend college as her family considered higher education unladylike. She lived off her trust fund, collecting books obsessively and travelling through Europe. She began writing poetry in her late 20s, inspired (and presumably aroused) by seeing the performances of Italian actress Eleonora Duse. Lowell’s first major romance was with Bessie Seecomb, the daughter of a sea captain whom she met on a trans-Atlantic crossing. In 1912, she met actress Ada Dywer Russell, who became her life partner and muse for much of her love poetry. Lowell and Russell travelled together to Europe, where they met Imagist poet Ezra Pound. He became both a major influence on Lowell’s poetry and her chief antagonist, accused her of “hijacking” the Imagist poetry movement, threatening to sue her for publishing a poetry anthology, and referring to the American Imagists as “Amygists”. Lowell’s success, boisterous presence and love of cigar-smoking also antagonised poet Witter Banner, who called her a “hippopoetess”. The poet e. e. cummings, while publicly supportive of her poetry, described her work as “a development from the normal to the abnormal”. Lowell died in 1925, aged 51. The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection What’s O’Clock.