BI. Amy Lowell

26. M[onroe], H[arriet]. ‘Rubies in a Gate of Stone’. Review of What’s O’clock (12). Poetry 27 (1925): 154-58.

Monroe is perceptive for the date in noting that ‘the hokku in English is . . . a highly artificial form, whatever it may be in Japanese’, and becomes ‘something of a stunt, with an effect doubtless worlds away from its oriental feeling and atmosphere’. Lowell ‘uses it like . . . [a] lady confiding her resignation to a three-stringed lute’, and the ‘effect’ she achieves is ‘in a level minor key, with no crescendos or climaxes’.