BI. Amy Lowell

6. Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Reprint, New York: Octagon, 1971.

In a section that addresses Imagism Lowell discusses only H. D. and Fletcher, pointedly not Pound, and devotes six pages to Japanese Prints (BH7). She finds that Fletcher’s poems, though ‘not written absolutely in the Japanese idiom’, have nonetheless ‘a distinct perfume of Japan about them’, and notes particularly that ‘to an occidental mind’ The Young Daimyo (7q) has ‘certainly the charm of Japan’. Schwartz (28) finds in the latter comment evidence that Lowell’s acquaintance with Japanese tradition was ‘at first decidedly superficial’, and surely The Young Daimyo is among the last of the Japanese Prints to evidence anything of Japan but a conventional Western fancy about it. Nonetheless, by August of the year in which this work appeared Lowell’s knowledge of the country was sound enough to have arrived at the impressive detail of Guns as Keys (7).