BI. Amy Lowell

24. Reviews of Pictures of the Floating World (8), 1919-20.

a. Booklist 16 (1919): 81. Notes that the poems are ‘seldom translations’ but nonetheless have ‘a touch of the Chinese and Japanese’.

b. New Republic 20 (1919): pt. 2, p. 2. Finds Lacquer Prints ‘influenced by oriental pictures and oriental legends’ and inclusive of works ‘in the brief form adapted from the Japanese . . . hokku’. In this way they ‘derive from the orient in a double way’.

c. S[eiffert], M[arjorie] A. ‘The Floating World’. Poetry 15 (1920): 332-37. Seiffert believes the Lacquer Prints to be ‘fashioned after Japanese models in a “quasi-oriental idiom”’ that is ‘carefully wrought, highly polished, and sometimes a little hard’. Lowell handles this ‘form of poetry’ well, but ‘her treatment does not differ . . . greatly from that of several other poets who “do the hokku into English”’. Though this is a ‘much over-rated form, fit to be the vehicle of only the tiniest facets of emotion’, its ‘charm’ is that ‘when well done . . . the economy of its images releases the imagination of the reader to fill in the pictures with something to him significant’. This may be ‘ruined’ by ‘rigidity . . . conventional imagination, or a lifeless subject’, but some of Lowell’s poems ‘carry magic in every word’. Outside a Gate (8n) is among those specifically cited in this regard.