BI. Amy Lowell and Japan

		Lowell turned to images of Japan frequently, from her first book, published in 1912, to two posthumously-published monographs of 1925 and 1927. The Japan poems that appeared along the way push the appropriation of Japanese motifs perhaps as far as was possible for an American poet of early century who had not in fact been to Japan.

In 1885 the Japanese Ambassador to London formally protested the ‘misrepresentation of Japanese life’ in The Mikado, but by 1917 a Japanese admirer had written to Amy Lowell of the pleasure he had taken in the ‘descriptive power’ of her verse evocations of Japan, and to inquire about the number of years she had lived there (see 27), not realising that Lowell’s Japan was constructed entirely at Sevenels, the Lowell family mansion on the aristocratic outskirts of Boston. Lowell turned to Japan in her verse frequently, from her first book in 1912, Dome of Many Coloured Glass (1), to the posthumously-published What’s O’Clock (12) and Ballads for Sale (13) of 1925 and 1927. The Japan poems that appeared along the way push the appropriation of Japanese settings and motifs perhaps as far as was possible for an American poet of early century who had not in fact been to Japan. In the most successful of the work, the ‘Lacquer Prints’, written between 1912 and 1919 and collected in Pictures of the Floating World (8), and ‘Guns as Keys’ (7), the long central poem of Can Grande’s Castle, Lowell combines a studious interest in Edo culture with a spare imagism and keen sense of detail to effect poems that are remarkably true to their Japanese subjects. In these and other poems of Japan Lowell is not immune to stylistic excesses of the sort that characterise Ficke’s Japan, or the conceptual lapses of a Fletcher—the Japan poems of both, in fact, were among the many sources from which Lowell worked—but she had a surer hand with the material than her contemporaries, and more than any poet of the period brought Japan into the popular literary imagination of the United States and Britain. The first printing of Pictures was sold out in advance of its September 1919 publication at Houghton-Mifflin, and two further printings by Christmas. The objections of writers such as Aiken and D. H. Lawrence aside (see especially BA4 and BI37— ‘Don’t do Japanese things, Amy, if you love us . . . it is so saddening’, Lawrence wrote to Lowell upon first seeing the ‘Lacquer Prints’), Lowell’s poems of Japan were among the most popular and influential of their day, and remain to this day among the most adept representations of the Japanese tradition in English poetry. All poems noted are reprinted in Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, edited by Louis Untermeyer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955).