BI. Amy Lowell

21. Letter (1919). Quoted in Ryan (39), 1997, p. 375.

What Lowell ‘mean[t] to give’ in the postludes to GUNS AS KEYS (7, see especially 7a11 and b4), she writes, ‘was the effect that each country [Japan and the United States] had upon the other. In the Japanese section, how difficult it was for the Oriental to assimilate the Occidental habits of thought, how he broke in the effort; in the American part, how, in conquering Japan for our commerce, as we thought, we had ourselves been conquered on the aesthetic plane, and our habits of thought insensibly modified by contact with the Japanese’.