BI. Amy Lowell

33. Ruihley, Glenn Richard. The Thorn of a Rose: Amy Lowell Reconsidered. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1975.

Includes a chapter contending that the ‘antecedents’ of Imagism are in Zen Buddhism, but Ruihley’s understanding of both Imagism and Zen is idiosyncratic. Includes some misinformation—Bashô (Ap) was not a monk, no evidence links T. E. Hulme with haiku by 1907—and a variety of suspect judgements: few would agree that Lowell was a ‘contemplative’, that her poem The Japanese Wood-Carving (1a) demonstrates ‘the suchness of things as they stream endlessly from the Great Void’, or that Pound ‘contributed little or nothing’ to the development of Imagism.