A. Critical and Comparative Studies

18. Schwartz, William Leonard. ‘L’Appel de l’extrème-Orient dans la poésie des États-Unis’. Revue de littérature comparée, January 1928, pp. 113-26.

Carefully traces the Japanese ‘influence’ on American poetry from Whitman’s Broadway Pageant and Longfellow’s Keramos (see CA1) through late work by Amy Lowell. Discusses the use of Japanese materials by, among others, Bynner, Ficke, and Fletcher, along with Pound’s debt to haiku and his handling of the Fenollosa manuscripts. Includes a knowledgeable list of works that helped spread the influence, including translations by Dickins (D3), Porter (D20), and Chamberlain (D5a), and commentaries by Percival Lowell (D6), Hearn (D9), and Noguchi (especially D15e6). The demonstration in a footnote of Lowell’s unacknowledged debt to Edmond de Goncourt’s works about Utamaro and Hokusai (see BI4f, 7a8, and 8aa) is presented in more detail in Schwartz’s ‘Study of Amy Lowell’s Far Eastern Verse’ (BI28) published two months later.