English Language and Literature DOI:`10. 15794/jell. 2018. 64. 1.

001
Vol. 64 No. 2 (2018) 3-24

Amygism or Imagism?: Re-Vision of Amy Lowell’s

Discourse of Imagism*

Jihee Han

I.  Introduction

Is Amy Lowell a “fake,”1 self-made poet or a serious Imagist poet? As

Carl Rollyson describes, she wrote and published more than 650 poems
and a number of critical reviews on modern American poets, and truly
drew public attention as today’s ‘Diva’ poet with “a bold, informal voice,
and bright, colorful sensory imagery” (xvii). But, how come she was not
received as a serious poet but mocked and even criticized as a “hippo-poet-
ess,” “elephantine poet,” or “demon saleswoman of modern poetry” among
her contemporaries (xvii-xviii) and continues to be viewed in the same
negative light? Is it because she “came from a wealthy and staunchly cap-
italist family” (xvii)? Is it because she invaded Man’s sphere of leading
cultural trends, calling herself “the last of the barons” and acting like “a
daughter of the Caesars” (xvii, 46)? Is it because she disputed with Ezra
Pound and took his “Imagisme” upon herself? Is it because she offended
the male-centered literary community by writing about the poetic subjects
that a woman poet ought not to? Is it because she had “a genius for every-
thing” except for a poetic talent (xix)? These are the questions that strike
us first even before making an attempt to re-consider Lowell’s poetic tal-
ent she showed in the process of blending contemporary artistic trends
together into Imagist poetry. Why does she hold so insignificant a posi-
tion as to be almost invisible in the literary history of American poetic
modernism, despite her conspicuous contribution to developing the incip-
ient stage of Imagism into a literary movement?
If trying to think of some reasons, the first thing that comes to our mind
C
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of
Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A5A2A0
1026802).
1
Robert Frost said in a letter to Untermeyer, “I don’t believe that she is any-
thing but a fake” (Meyers 132).
2 Jihee Han

will be Ezra Pound, the impresario who created “Des Imagistes” and first
planted a flag of “Imagisme” on the ground of New Poetry. After all, it
was he who made a critical impact on the way the following generations
of scholars would receive Lowell’s Imagist poetry: he scorned her Imagist
discourse as “Amygism” and put out his harsh criticism of her poetic
style, calling it “emotional slither,” “mushy technique,” and “general
floppiness” (Bradshaw 172). Since then, the scarlet brand of “Amygism”
seems to have been taken as ‘something for granted’ among literary histo-
rians of American poetic modernism. For instance, in The Gender of
Modernism (1990) Bonnie Kime Scott makes an issue of “the politics of
gender” in the canon-making of modernism, arguing as follows:

Though some of the aesthetic and political pronouncements of women writ-

ers had been offered in public, they had not circulated widely and were rare-
ly collected for academic recirculation. Deliberate or not, this is an example
of the politics of gender. Typically, both the authors of original manifestos
and the literary historians of modernism took as their norm a small set of its
male participants, who were quoted, anthologized, taught, and consecrated
as geniuses. (2)

Yet, somehow, Lowell, who may serve as a perfect candidate for the cate-
gory of ‘the ignored woman writers’ addressed above, makes only a fleet-
ing appearance in H. D.’s letters and disappears behind the curtain. In
Gendered Modernism: American Women Poets and Their Readers (1996)
Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano, once again criticizing that
“American poetic modernism was conventionally construed as a predomi-
nantly white male phenomenon” (vii), included eight “good minor”
woman poets, who are H. D., Gertrude Stein, Gwendolyn Brooks,
Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop and Muriel
Rukeyser. They explained their reason for selecting these poets, saying
“[they] voiced their resistance to literary tradition and history in open and
abrasive terms” (xiv):

Gendered, modernism gives up its singularity and becomes more than the mono-
lithic movement dominated by one important (and male) figure—whether it be
Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens, as traditional arguments have had it. Gendered,
modernism becomes a diverse, disruptive series of movements, with a political
left as well as political right, enacted in an arena where ideas of order contended
with questions of sexuality, eroticism, and pornography, as well as domesticity
and sentimentality. Gendered, modernism can configure issues of race and class
 Amygism or Imagism? 3

from the position of the outsider, the dispossessed, the deracinated. Gendered,
modernism emerges as sexier, more violent, more personal, more subversive.
(viii)

Here again, Lowell did not make the list of “good minor” woman poets,
even though she could pass their critical standard of being a “productive
and creative insider in a movement [they] cannot fully understand unless
[they] examine [her] role in shaping it” (viii), and even though she could
make a good case to claim the necessity for correcting the one-sided
canon and the monolithic nature of “gendered, modernism.” If they had
adjusted their critical gaze a bit and examined Lowell’s tireless efforts to
experiment with and write about ‘something new,’ it would not have been
too hard to see her getting abreast of Pound in walking down the confus-
ing path of Imagism and also to listen to her making a different sound-
wave as well as releasing a woman poet’s psychic energy. Nonetheless,
possibly due to the gravitational wave that Pound’s verdict of “Amygism”
had made in 1914, they never seem to have thought of paying attention to
her creative endeavors to provide not only a unified discourse of Imagism
but also a means for the common reading public to come to terms with
modern poetry. Still in the twenty-first century, it is hard to find scholar-
ship to take a close look at the stylistic innovations Lowell made with her
passion to present a new portrait of a lady from a woman’s point of view.
However, if willing to compare Lowell’s tireless efforts to nurture
Imagism into a new trend of poetry with Pound’s from 1912 to 1917, it is
possible to see that she did make notable contribution to the development
of poetic modernism as much as Pound did. As for Pound, after he pub-
lished the “Imagist Manifesto” and Ripostes, containing his Imagist
experiment with the minimalist language up to 1912, he continued trans-
lating and publishing Italian sonnets and Guido Cavalcanti’s ballads.
Then he fell fascinated by the translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry
and moved toward Vorticism to intensify his Imagist ideas while publish-
ing Cathay in 1915. In 1916, although he published Lustra, including pre-
vious translation works and some of his Imagist-style poems, he did not
make a wide impact on the literary community due to the time’s hard cen-
sorship. Thus, during the three year period when he handed over the name
“Imagism” to Lowell, it is true to say that he succeeded neither in materi-
alizing his Vorticism into a distinctive school or a movement of New
Poetry2 nor in pulling out enthusiastic responses from the literary commu-
2
A David Moody estimates Pound’s “Imagisme as such” was “short-lived”
4 Jihee Han

nity in Europe as well as in America. As Lowell once remarked, “Pound

has only found Pound” (qtd. in Rollyson 55).
On the contrary, after the publication of her first collection of poems, A
Dome of Many-Colored Class (1912), Lowell continued to give concrete
shape to her artistic passion “to bring the beauty into the world”
(Rollyson 66) as well as her social passion to expand the base of poet-
ry-reading. In particular, she showed a strong sense of commitment to
present the experiences of the modern world from a woman poet’s point
of view. While Pound grew skeptical about the machine age and the
masses of common folks, fascinated by “an image/of its accelerated gri-
mace” or “a prose kinema” (“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” in Poems and
Translations 549-550), she wrote and published free verse poems and
prose poems, considering the public as her target audience. In addition,
she continued to carry out her experimentation to create the poetics of
Imagist polyphony which plays Western poetics and Eastern aesthetics in
the contrapuntal complexity. For instance, in 1914 she published Sword
Blades and Poppy Seeds, in which she experimented with an Imagist
technique of ‘sensuous suggestion,’ trying to escape from Victorian senti-
mentality. In 1916 she published Men, Women and Ghosts, in which she
pushed her notion of ‘free-style’ Imagist poetry a bit further, making an
attempt to present women’s psychological topography. In 1917, complet-
ing her three year project of settling a place for a new generation of
Imagist poets in America, she published Tendencies in Modern American
Poetry and showed her critical calibre, applying her Imagist principles to
the review of H. D., John G. Fletcher, E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, E. L.
Masters and Carl Sandberg. In a word, she was successful in reshaping
Pound’s “Imagisme” into her own Imagism as well as in communicating
her vision of Imagist Poetry to “a decision making group” (Han 248) in
the early twentieth century American literary market.
Therefore, this paper, postulating that Lowell’s Imagism is not some
“Amygism” that wobbles with “emotional slither,” “mushy technique”
and “general floppiness” as Pound once mocked (Bradshaw 172), but
another kind of poetic discourse that deserves the fullest re-consideration,
(255). He continues “He didn’t much care for theorizing, and would throw out a
remark here and a statement there without concerning himself with constructing
a full account of it” (255). I agree with Moody that there is no “coherent and
cogent theory” of Vorticism (255) by 1917 and in this paper argue that Pound’s
critical theory of Imagism/Vorticism was not strong enough to overshadow
Lowell’s during the three year period.
 Amygism or Imagism? 5

goes back to the very scene where Pound left for Vorticism, condescend-
ingly allowing Lowell and her supporters to use the name “Imagism” for
three years. There, it tries to illuminate how Lowell, making the most of
the opportunity given to her, picked up what Pound had left behind, graft-
ed it on the soil of America, and finally fulfilled her literary passion to
awaken the common reading public to the taste for poetry reading. For the
purpose, it reads her critical reviews closely in Tendencies in Modern
American Poetry,3 and looks into her creative critical efforts to re-address
Pound’s principles of “Imagisme.” Given the limit of space, however, it
focuses only on the second principle of her Imagism and examines the
modernity of her concepts of “a cadence,” “suggestion,” and “the real
poem beyond.” Then it analyzes “Patterns” in the context of Japanese
poetry and Noh drama and shed light on the poetic patterns that Lowell
made through a creative adaptation of Japanese aesthetics for Imagist
poetics. In doing so, this paper aims to provide reasonable evidences to
estimate the value of Lowell’s Imagist ars poetica and to consider her a
truly serious Imagist poet worthy of a place in the history of American
poetic modernism.

II.  A Different Approach to a Poet’s Role

In Tendencies Lowell defines “Imagism” as “a particular school, spring-

ing up within a larger, more comprehensive movement, the New
Movement” (237). She also remarks that “we4 can safely claim it to be a
‘renaissance,’ a re-birth of the spirit of truth and beauty” as well as “a
re-discovery of beauty in our modern world” (237). Here, what does
Lowell mean by the idea of “renaissance”? And, whose spiritual
“re-birth” does she mean? The clue to answer these questions may be
found in the “Preface” of Tendencies, where she talks about the affect of
the war in a bit excited tone:

3
From now on Tendencies in Modern American Poetry is abbreviated to
Tendencies.
4
Lowell names only six poets, H. D. and John G. Fletcher, Richard
Aldington, F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence and herself, as Imagist poets, and catego-
rizes Pound as belonging to the more comprehensive New Movement. Here in
particular, she identifies “we” to be American Imagists, including H. D. and
John G. Fletcher and herself.
6 Jihee Han

The welding together of the whole country which the war has brought about
. . . has produced a more poignant sense of nationality. . . . Hyphens are sub-
merged in the sold overprinting of the word “America.” We are no more col-
onies of this or that other land, but ourselves, different from all other peo-
ples whatsoever. (v)

As suggested in the above, from the start of rolling out her discourse of
Imagism in America, Lowell seems to have had in her mind a fundamen-
tally different viewpoint from Pound in the matter of a poet’s role and
responsibility. Capturing the rising sense of American national solidarity
the war had brought about, Lowell launches Imagism as a national litera-
ture project and thus positions herself as an ‘American’ Imagist poet, who
heralds the new beginning of a distinctive school of American poetry in
the modern world of letters. Given that she is ‘Lowell,’ one of whose
ancestors is James Russel Lowell, a member of Fireside Poets group
along with Ralph W. Emerson, Lowell’s critical position certainly reso-
nates with Emerson’s, who had first remarked the necessity for American
literary independence in the essay “The American Scholar.” Like
Emerson, she, too, aligns her objectives of Imagism to the cultural project
of recovering the spirit of independence, free from “factitious poses and
sentimentality” of late nineteenth-century English poetry (Rollyson 31).
With so much pride, thus, she calls her critical efforts an “evolution” of
Pound’s “Imagisme” and states that “the tendencies and aims” of
American Imagist poets will be “a re-discovery of beauty in our modern
world” and “the originality and honesty to affirm that beauty in whatever
manner is native to the poet” (Tendencies 236-37). She even predicts that
all participating Imagist poets “will in twenty years reconstruct the taste
of this country” (Rollyson 59).
In this grain of thinking, it is possible to say that Lowell did not tran-
substantiate Pound’s “Imagisme” from its original spirit of modernity.
Rather, it seems more proper to say that she de-territorialized “Des
Imagistes” from Pound’s Imagist position, rooted in “a larger, more com-
prehensive movement” (Tendencies 237) of contemporary European mod-
ernism, and tried to re-territorialize them on the native soil that they natu-
rally belonged to, with the aim of classifying them as “Some [American]
Imagist Poets” who “not only express themselves differently” but also
“see life and the universe from a different standpoint” (Tendencies 237).
Nevertheless, it seems that Pound and other contemporary men of letters
were skeptical about Lowell’s intellectual capabilities to understand the
 Amygism or Imagism? 7

fullest meaning of the term, “Imagist.” As I examined in my essay “A

Thinking Woman Caged in a Fat, Ugly, and Unwomanly Body,” Pound,
in particular, seems to have looked down upon her literary capability, say-
ing “there is no democracy in the arts” (qtd. in Rollyson). Given that she
had no formal training at a higher institution, Pound seems to have esti-
mated her aesthetic taste and critical judgment to be the product of
non-professional, non-institutionally-certified, and only class-based dilet-
tantism.5 Thus, he appears to have made a judgment that she lacked the
expertise and analytical precision of a professional poet like himself,
Richard Aldington and H. D. who were educated with classical forms and
meters of Anglo-Saxon and Greek poetry. For instance, in a letter to Alice
Corbin Henderson, Pound expressed his repugnance and distrust of
Lowell’s artistic taste and predilections, saying that “a purer imagism”
would go “to hell with Amy’s gush and Fletcher’s squibbs, fluid diarrhoea
in the first and a diarrhoea of bent nails and carpet tacks in the second’”
(Bradshaw 172). Nailing Lowell down as an amateur-kind of poor poet
with the higher social capital but the lower intellectual capital, he predict-
ed that she would breed his child of “Imagisme” with “a rabble of the
filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” (“The Garden” in
Poems and Translations 264) and end up producing a literary mutation
that he stigmatized as “Amygism.”
However, if removing the negative silk lid smeared with Pound’s taste for
concrete, hard, and dry “Imagisme” from a poetic jar of Lowell’s
“Imagism” and let its contents smell as they are, there arises a new scent
for readers to recognize. In other words, those who prefer the austere,
satiric, and full-bodied flavor of Pound’s European red wine may find
Lowell’s American-style sake-rice wine to be fruity, plain, and simple and
thus may evaluate it as inferior. However, if opening their minds to a dif-
ferent flavor and trying to get to know the details of Lowell’s Imagism,
they may find the very flavor of what Pound once mocked as “fluid,
fruity” and “facile,” paradoxically, to be the very evidence of another
kind of Imagism, containing high-quality contemporary flavor of
Japanese aestheticism. “Astigmatism” is a good example to prove how
Lowell adds a leaven of Japanese aesthetic idea, called wabi,6 to evoke an

In this paper I base my arguments of class and taste on Pierre Bourdieu’s

5

Distinction.
6
Wabi means ‘simple, austere beauty.’ It is often suggested in the poetic pre-
sentation of a garden strewn with fallen petals of cherry blossoms.
8 Jihee Han

effect of Imagist polyphony in the mode of Western free verse. This

poem, since dedicated to Pound, has been interpreted as Lowell’s criti-
cism of Pound’s “imperfect vision, his inability to take in life as it is and
make something of it” (Rollyson 55). However, looking carefully into the
way she presents sensuous images of flowers, it is also possible to notice
that Lowell is not particularly focusing on Pound’s peculiarity. Rather,
apparently commenting on the taste of a highly cultivated poet, who stub-
bornly applies a narrow set of aesthetic standards to the world of diverse
beauty, she indirectly speaks out her predilection for simple, austere beau-
ty of common things:

The Poet came to a garden.

Dahlias ripened against a wall,
Gillyflowers stood up bravely for all their short stature,
And a trumpet-vine covered an arbour
With the red and gold of its blossoms.
Red and gold like the brass notes of trumpets. (Selected Poems 13)

Here, Dahlias, gullyflowers, and a trumpet-vine are introduced in contrast

with English roses because they are all simple native flowers which sug-
gest a distinctively American kind of natural beauty. Watching these
small, dowdy flowers doing their best to sustain their lives by leaning
against a wall, or trying to stand up high, or clinging to an arbour in a
peaceful garden, any poet may begin his/her meditation on the tenacious
will to life that every living thing is supposed to have.
At that moment, the shape of a trumpet-vine flower arouses the poet’s
imagination as if alerting him/her to listen to the actual “brass notes of
trumpets” in the battle field somewhere in Europe. Yet the poet, deciding
to seek out his ideal for purer art, closes his/her ears to the outside reality
and gives to each flower a critical judgment, saying ‘not enough’:

The Poet knocked off the stiff heads of the dahlias,

And his cane lopped the gillyflowers at the ground.
Then he severed the trumpet-blossoms from their stems.
Red and gold they lay scattered,
Red and gold, as on a battle field
Red and gold, prone and dying.
“They were not roses,” said the Poet. (Selected Poems 13-14)

Now this peculiar poet may be Pound, but may include other poets as
 Amygism or Imagism? 9

well, who should deal with the subject of war in one way or another. The
important point here is, she suggests that she would never choose to be an
exclusive poet: instead of being an elite poet who cares for the pure, ever-
lasting ideal beauty whose value a limited group of audience could appre-
ciate, she chooses to present the issues of the modern world that common
American public may recognize with empathy and compassion. She
reveals such a spirit in the play of Imagist polyphony, where she associ-
ates the fallen “red and gold” native flowers with the dying and dead
three times. First, she presents “red and gold” native blossoms scattered
in the garden, reminding readers of the evanescence of life; then, she
associates the “red and gold” colors with the gold color of cannon firing
and the red color of soldiers’ blood on a battle ground where “knocked
off,” “lopped,” and “severed” soldiers are scattered; lastly, she awakens
readers to the “red and gold” colors in the battles of life, where common
folks, scattered here and there, are going through pain and dying, follow-
ing a cycle of living, aging, getting sick, and dying. Through repeating the
image of “red and gold” but evoking a different meditative swing each
time, Lowell suggests her conviction for the role of a poet: a poet should
take a social responsibility to grasp the battles of life in the microscopic
level as well as in the macroscopic level and to enlighten the public mind
with the beauty of each and all living things. At the same time, by inten-
tionally repeating a direct quotation of the poet who gives up such respon-
sibility, saying “they are not roses,” “they were not roses,” and “there
were no roses,” she makes her silent suggestion all the more clearly.
Truly, as an intellectual nobility Pound insisted that “the history of art is
the history of masterwork, not of failures or mediocrity” and showed an
elite poet’s tendency to seek out for the “fine but forgotten” beauty which
would delight the highly sophisticated taste of the bourgeois intelligentia
(ABC of Reading 1). As a social nobility, however, Lowell reveals her dis-
agreement with such an exclusive taste and thus gives her own critical
verdict as follows:

Peace be with you, Brother.

But behind you is destruction, and waste places. (Selected Poems 13-14)

Perhaps, readers may have to fly high or dive deep to appreciate the
“Attic grace” Pound sculptured and ripened with the mastery of Western
artistic traditions in the past and at present. And, perhaps, they may think
little of a variety of national and exotic flowers that Lowell planted in her
10 Jihee Han

garden while encountering the contemporary artistic trends in modernism.

Yet, if considering the transformative power of “literature” that is ”rooted
to life” (Tendencies vi), they may finally agree with Lowell’s verdict
because poetry is really an effective tool to stimulate the public mind to
question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives to the very life they are
living at the moment. In this respect, Lowell’s act of choice to become a
poet who observes the continuity between art and life is in no way passive
or, as David Perkins says, staying “safely within the fold of familiar
Romantic convention.” Rather, her choice reflects her social ethos and
suggests her serious poetic mind to enter the current of the modernity, to
exert her utmost freedom to observe the stream of modern consciousness,
to imagine women’s fantasies, to put them on paper, and to present their
complex psychological reality as female readers would know it. Thus,
holding up the flag of “Some [American] Imagist Poets” high as “the evi-
dence of the rise of a native school” (Tendencies v), Lowell seems to have
exerted every effort to be conducive to the re-birth of American poetry in
the modern world.

III.  A Different Approach to the Manner of Presentation

Given her different approach to a poet’s role, it is interesting to examine

how Lowell expands her critical share in the pre-occupied discursive ter-
ritory of Pound’s “Imagisme.” Conscious of Pound’s “Imagist Manifesto”
in 1912, Lowell presents six Imagist principles in Tendencies and
describes “what Imagism is, and for what those poets who style them-
selves ‘Imagists’ stand” (Tendencies 239). Basically, she agrees with
Pound in the point that Imagist poets should focus on “presentation, not
representation” (Tendencies 245) and thus emphasizes that “the Imagist
poets” are concerned with “the manner of presentation” more than “the
thing presented” (Tendencies 244). Yet, while keeping Pound’s tenets on
hardness, clarity, and precision, she puts another spin on the matter of
presentation: instead of making the image as a highly condensed fusion of
thing and action and intellect and emotion, she argues that Imagist poets
should make it their primary poetic concern to create a different “mood”
or flow in expressing the concrete experiences of “the [modern] world in
which they live” (Tendencies 240).
In this respect, Lowell’s critical position clashes again with Pound’s
position that equates the appreciation of art to an intellectual play.
 Amygism or Imagism? 11

Supposing Pound’s target audience is the selective readers who hold the
high educational capital and refined taste for pure art, it is possible to say
that when he defined an Image as “an intellectual and emotional complex
in an instant of time” (“A Retrospect,” Literary Essays 4), he had presup-
posed a set of codes, such as “some form of ecstasy,” “some splendor of
thought, some presentation of sheer beauty, some lightening turn of
phrase,” that only intellectuals could recognize and decipher properly
(ABC of Reading 2). Certainly, leading a new avant-garde wave among
the younger generation of artists in reaction to the stale, hackneyed tradi-
tion of English poetry, he distanced himself from the newly emerging
class of workers whose taste would be easily distracted to “a prose kine-
ma” (“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” in Poems and Translations 550).
Instead, he aimed to invite the bourgeois reading class who accumulated
the intellectual capital at higher academic institutions and tried to gratify
their desire for “the sublime in the old sense” or “the Attic Grace” (“Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley” in Poems and Translations 549). Thus, in his critical
discourse of Imagism and later Vorticism, it seems he expected younger
poets to show first their intellectual capabilities to know the artistic tradi-
tions of the West and the East, and to classify the characteristics of each
literary genre, and to form a genealogy of great writers they can refer to.
In addition, he expected them to present “an Image” which does not allow
just sensory experiences but provokes a complex aesthetic experience, in
which readers can connect their intellectual capabilities to the artist’s cre-
ative imagination to re-make the old traditions, to the artist’s individual
style to express his modern experiences, or to the artist’s earnest quest for
truth and beauty. In a word, it can be said that he expected both highly
creative artists and highly sophisticated readers to make their artistic cre-
ation and appreciation of art correspondent to the intellectual enjoyment
of encoding aesthetic components and deciphering such codes in their
own society of high modernism.
On the contrary, Lowell, who aims to fulfill her passion to refine the
reading public’s taste through poetry-reading, shows a tendency to deval-
ue such an intellectual approach as pedantic and scholastic. Instead, she
favors a mode of presentation that could generate direct experiences of
the modern subjects and stimulate the reading public’s mind to make their
artistic experiences applicable to the ways they conceive of their lives.
Therefore, in the second principle of Imagism, Lowell shifts the focus
from how to produce a new modern poetic style to how to present a mod-
ern point of view. Here it is important to see the difference between
12 Jihee Han

Pound’s and Lowell’s creative approach in the discussion of “new

rhythms” and “free verse.” As is well-known, in “A Retrospect” Pound
put much emphasis on “rhythm and rhyme,” saying that a poet needs to
“compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
metronome” (Literary Essays 3). He provided a long section to give
examples of common practices of neophytes, average musicians, and sci-
entists, and then described the crucial reason for why a poet needs to pon-
der over how to produce a “the finest cadences he can discover”:

In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that

phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. . . . Naturally, your
rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natu-
ral sound, or their meaning. . . . The musician can rely on pitch and the vol-
ume of the orchestra. You cannot. The term harmony is misapplied in poet-
ry; it refers to simultaneous sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in
the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the
hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base. (“A Retrospect,” Literary
Essays 5)

Here, Pound divided between a “sound” and a “pitch” and highly evaluat-
ed a poet’s craft to create “an absolute rhythm” which “corresponds
exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed” (“A
Retrospect,” Literary Essays 6). Just as Li Po had shown his mastery by
handling four pitches freely within the traditional rhythms and rhymes
and thus produced a new structure of cadence in the history of Chinese
poetry, Pound, too, presented his strong credo about the cadence of the
whole poem, saying “poetry is an art and not a pastime; such a knowledge
of technique, of technique of surface and technique of content, that the
amateurs will cease to try do drown out the masters” (“A Retrospect,”
Literary Essays 10). Even when he argued that the key of poetic experi-
ence was emotion (“only emotion endures”), he maintained a non-nego-
tiable position on the matter of how to present the “austere, direct, and
free cadence,” saying “we will have fewer painted adjectives impeding
the shock and stroke of it” (“A Retrospect,” Literary Essays 12).
On the other hand, Lowell first indicates the confusing state of Imagist
discourse, saying that Imagist poets “are somewhat divided in their prac-
tice,” and then diverts the critical attention from the expertise, technique,
and craft to ‘the idea’ or ‘the mood’ that a poet should aim to deliver:

2. To create new rhythms --as the expression of new moods—and not to

 Amygism or Imagism? 13

copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon
“free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a
principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be
better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry a new
cadence means a new idea. (Tendencies 239)

As for her, “subtlety and beauty of rhythms” or “clearness and vividness

of presentation” or “concentration” are “not new principles” that Imagist
poets can claim their originality (Tendencies 246). Granted that they are
all aware of Victorian rhythms and rhymes having gotten “fallen into des-
titute” of freshness, originality, or novelty to catch the ears of modern
readers (Tendencies 246), what they should be more concerned is, she
suggests, not a Poundian renovation of technique in the quest of “the
absolute rhythm,” but a new viewpoint to approach “vers libre” or “the
cadenced verse” (Tendencies 262). In Some Imagist Poets (1916), she had
already presented her idea of “a cadenced verse,” identifying it as “a
verse-form based upon cadence” (Tendencies 262). She asserted that
“cadence in music is one thing, cadence in poetry quite another” because
Imagist poets “are not dealing with tone, but with rhythm” (Tendencies
262).
Now in Tendencies (1917) Lowell pushes forward her notion of a
cadenced verse a bit further:

It is the sense of perfect balance of flow and rhythm. Not only must the syl-
lables so fall as to increase and continue the movement, the whole poem
must be as rounded and recurring as the circular swing of a balanced pendu-
lum. It can be fast or slow, it may even jerk, but this perfect swing it must
have, even its jerks must follow the central movement. (Tendencies 262)

Though her metaphor of “the circular swing” may sound vague, she does
her best to explain of the aesthetic “balance” that a cadenced verse is sup-
posed to achieve:

The unit of verse libre is not the foot, the number of syllables, the quantity,
or the line. The unit is strophe, which may be the whole poem, or may be
only a part. Each strophe is a complete circle; in fact, the meaning of the
Greek word “strophe” is simply that part of the poem which was recited
while the chorus was making a turn round the altar set up in the center of
the theatre. . . . There is room here for an infinite number of variations.
Also, circles can be added to circles, movement upon movement to the
14 Jihee Han

poem, provided each movement completes itself, and ramifies naturally into
the next. (italics mine, Tendencies 262)

Here, breaking free from the traditional ideas of rhythm, meter, and
cadence, she calls a basic unit of a rhythm “a strophe” instead of “a foot.”
According to her, “a strophe” is not “the number of syllables, the quantity,
or the line” (262), but rather, “a complete circle” or “a cadence” that
encloses its own idea and at the same time interpenetrates and intermin-
gles with the following circles within a given time of reciting the whole
poem. She then gives an illustration of her idea of “strophe” by critiquing
H. D.’s “Oread”:

1) Whirl up, sea--

2) Whirl your pointed pines,
3) Splash your great pines
on our rocks
4) Hurl your green over us
5) Cover us with your pools of fir. (Tendencies 264)

Here, probably conscious of Pound’s criticism of H. D.’s “Oread,” she

chooses an honest fight with Pound by reviewing the same poem but
doing it differently. Unlike Pound who paid critical attention to H. D.’s
poetic craft of presenting the “subjective condition” in “the objectified
Image” (Moody 226), she creatively interprets the meaning of “free” in
verse libre as ‘free-style’ in recitation and then examines how this poem
is composed of “five cadences,” based upon “time units.” According to
her, each cadence completes a circle of meaning while maintaining its
link with the central image of the turbulent sea. By changing the verbs
and also concrete images of “pointed pines” and “pools of fir,” she indi-
cates, H. D. concentrates on the movement of the turbulent sea itself, in
other words, on the pure mobility of tension (“whirl up, sea/ Whirl”) and
extension (“splash,” “hurl,” “cover”) at the moment of watching the sea.
Yet simply presenting concrete images will be incomplete, if a poet
does not fill them with the shades of emotions, which are supposed to be
transmitted in the act of reciting. Thus Lowell draws attention to the
“irregular measurement” of H. D.’s cadences: “some of them made up of
two, some of three, and, in the fourth line, the last two syllables are in the
nature of a feminine ending” (Tendencies 264). The point she emphasizes
through the example of H. D. is the artist’s arrangement of space, in
which “the words must be hurried or delayed to fill out the swing,” based
 Amygism or Imagism? 15

upon the natural manner of recitation (Tendencies 264). In other words,

Lowell compliments H. D. as an excellent Imagist not for having present-
ed the dynamic energy of the hard, concrete “Image,” but for having
repeated a simple meaning and a simple cadence throughout the poem so
that readers can enjoy vocalizing each poetic line (“a cadence”) and expe-
rience her viewpoint and emotions in their own free way.

IV.  A Different Adaptation of Japanese Aesthetics

By re-defining “a cadence” as ‘a recitation of one poetic idea,’ Lowell

establishes a discursive base of her own Imagist vision and have leeway
to take the trace of Pound’s signature out of the name ‘Imagist.’ First,
indicating that Pound’s “Imagisme” seemed more concerned with the
interests of “a school of painters,” she asserted in 1916 that “we
believe[d] poetry should render particulars exactly” (Tendencies 239).
Now in 1917, saying “a new cadence means a new idea” (Tendencies
264), she supplements Pound’s idea of “an Image” with her own creative
rendition of “a cadence” and concentrates on the performative aspect of
poetic lines more than the composing aspect of meter sequences in a poet-
ic text. As a result, those who read Lowell’s apparently simple and easy
poetic text may enjoy reciting a sequence of cadences in their own free-
style, while sometimes hurrying or delaying words, following their own
mood and feelings in understanding the poetic lines. On the contrary,
Pound’s readers may need to pay careful intellectual attention to each
word, each image, and the whole meter-sequences on a poetic text so that
they can listen to ‘the absolute rhythm’ that a creator-composer Pound
built with highly sophisticated artistic sense.
Interestingly, Lowell’s emphasis on the free-style of Imagist poetry
reminds readers of the liberty enjoyed by Japanese Haikai-no-renga writ-
ers.7 In the making of Haikai-no-renga, a seasonal subject is given to all
participants, with which each man of letters composes each seven-
teen-syllable haiku verse. Given such situation, each haiku, serving as a
complete circle, reflects each writer’s feelings and emotions to the given
subject, and at the same time gets linked to another haiku, and thus con-
tributes to the polyphony of Haikai-no-renga. Actually, considering the

For more explanation of Haikai-no-renga, please read my essay, “Mikang

7

and Orange: Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Poetics of Translation.”

16 Jihee Han

fact that she brings in a Japanese wood-block print to explain what she
means by the “balance” in her discussion of “strophe,” it is possible that
Japanese Haikai-no-renga genre, mandating a specific set of rules but giv-
ing full liberty to a poet, may have given Lowell an inspiration to muse
over blending the ancient Greek “strophe,” the exotic Japanese Haikai,
and the trendy French modern vers libre all together and developing her
idea of free-style Imagist poetry with “cadences.”
Secondly, leaving behind Pound’s argument for the direct treatment of
the things whether subjective or objective, Lowell introduces a new tech-
nique of sensuous “suggestion,” calling it “one characteristic of Imagist
verse” (Tendencies 247). By “suggestion” she means a way of “implying
of something rather than the stating of it, implying it perhaps under a met-
aphor, perhaps in an even less obvious way” (Tendencies 247). She
asserts that a poet should focus on how to present modern life “intelligi-
ble” within “the bounds of good tastes” (Tendencies 243-44) and provides
J. G. Fletcher’s “The Well” as an illustration:

The well is not used now

Its water are tainted.
I remember there was once a man went down
to clean it.
He found it very cold and deep,
With a queer niche in one of its sides,
From which he hauled fourth buckets of bricks and dirt. (Tendencies 247)

Although Pound showed some doubt of Fletcher’s poetic capability,

Lowell gives her positive critique, saying “the picture as given is quite
clear and vivid. But the picture we see is not the poem, the real poem lies
beyond, is only suggested” (Tendencies 247). Here, it is necessary to
understand Lowell’s class habitus in order to understand what she means
by “Imagist suggestion” and “the real poem lies beyond” (Tendencies
247).
As is well-known, Lowell had a very unique upbringing as a Victorian
lady: she had been heavily exposed to Japanese arts and crafts since early
childhood thanks to her brother Percival Lowell who had written two
books on Japan and China while working as an ambassador at Japan. He
sent his little sister pretty postcards, textiles, exotic memorabilia to gratify
her fancy on exotic places in Far East. In particular, Tsunejiro Miyaoka, a
Japanese servant he brought to the family house Sevenels introduced her
 Amygism or Imagism? 17

to Japanese Uta-poems in Manyoshu (Collection of One Thousand

Leaves), Haiku verses, many ghost stories, folk myths and legends and
helped her with developing her imagination with Japanese aesthetic imag-
es. In addition, Japanese men of distinction and Jananologists gave lec-
tures on East-Asian Zen Buddhism, Japanese spirituality, Shintoism,
ancient history, and arts at the Boston Athenaeum her great-grandfather
founded. In the vogue of Japonism she continued cultivating her taste and
predilection for Japanese aesthetics by collecting Japanese ukiyo-e prints,
watching Mikados and Noh dramas, writing Japanese Uta-style and
Haiku-style poems as well as lyrical poems on Japanese subjects and
themes.8 Her friend Florence Ascough testified Lowell’s expertise in
Japanese poetry when she described an episode concerning Mishima
Mountain represented in her poem “Guns as Keys: and the Great Gate
Swings”:

These vignettes are positively photographic in their vividness. Of all the many,
many descriptions of Japan which I have read, they are far and away the most
truthful. In fact, to me they are Japan. Nor am I peculiar in this respect. Soon
after the poem appeared in the Seven Arts, a Japanese wrote to Miss Lowell
expressing his wondering admiration of her descriptive power and, in closing,
asked hoe many years she had lived in his country! (MacNair 21).

Thus, it can be said that Lowell accumulated the high cultural capital
enough to act as an aesthete who intuitively understands Japanese poetic
principles and aesthetic ideals of balance and natural harmony through a
long period of family’s exposure to them. Rollyson also indicates that just
like old Japan’s court ladies or Greek island of Lesbos, Lowell displayed
a very aristocratic tendency to view writing poetry and appreciating its
beauty in a socially appropriate and tasteful way as “a daily achievement
without which an individual cannot survive” (4).
Given such class habitus, it is highly likely that Lowell found Japanese
poetic principle of “suggestion” very tasteful since it could serve as a
proper means to differentiate her aristocratic notion from Pound’s bour-
geois notion concerning the beauty that Imagist poets should seek for. As
an upper class lady she does not have to prove her artistic sensibility to
the intellectuals like Pound: all she needs to do is to ‘suggest’ her distinc-

She read translations of famous Japanese stories, including Genji Monogatari

8

by Murasaki Shikibu. She even wrote an introduction to Diaries of Court Ladies

of Old Japan, translated by Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi in 1920.
18 Jihee Han

tion in class-specific manners or to present rare symbolic objects in a

socially tasteful way. For instance, she provides Fletcher’s poem “The
Well” as a good example of “suggestion” but does not give any critical
explication because, as she implicates in Tendencies, she just knows that
beauty is not something reasoned through a scientific construction of con-
crete images but something understood naturally through a series of sen-
suous images that can stir up a mood or an atmosphere in a subtle way.
Still, she seems to be also aware of the fact that only an aesthete like her
would be able to recognize ‘the real poem beyond’ that Fletcher intended
with his highly suggestive haiku-style poem. In fact, who would be able
to catch the point with ease that Fletcher not only presented a clear and
vivid picture of his microcosmic subject of the unused well but also sug-
gested the macrocosmic scope of life and death on the perfect balance,
following the principle of Japanese aesthetic composition? It is not
strange, thus, that Lowell adapted Japanese poetic principles of ‘sugges-
tion’ and ‘the real poem beyond’ for Western readers when pondering
over a new stylistic mode.
Actually, Lowell’s creative adaptation of Japanese poetic principles and
aesthetics is very significant in two respects. It not only shows that
Lowell was very active in developing her own discourse of Imagism, but
also proves that both Lowell and Pound did not just ‘appropriate’ or
‘incorporate’ Japanese cultural texts such as Noh drama, woodblock
prints, and Haiku poetry into their Imagist poetry. In Lowell’s case, she
showed her creative originality by infusing Japanese aesthetic idea of
Yugen (幽玄), which has the meaning of “profound sublimity” (Komparu
12) or “profound grace,”9 into Western metaphysics. According to Kunio
Komparu, one of the famous taiko players of the Komparu school of
Japanese Noh theatre, the beauty of Yugen is “one of a number of funda-
mental ideas of beauty originally found in poetic theory” and has gone
through some changes in the meaning throughout Japanese history:

It was at first used to mean elegance or grace. From the days of the poet
Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204), it was taken to mean the beauty of yojo,
lingering charm or suggestiveness, and was considered the ideal of beauty
for classical 31-syllable poems called waka. It indicated a state of subtle,
haunting beauty in the heart, form, and sentiment of song-poems. Later it
was refined to become sabi, the quiet, rustic beauty embodied in the funda-

From now on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online is abbreviated to

9

SEPO.
 Amygism or Imagism? 19

mental aesthetic ideal of haiku. Then, we are told, it was cleansed of quietis-
tic hues and made artistic, coming to mean beauty that perfects. We see that
the nuances of the concept of yugen have changed down through the ages,
but Zeami took the idea of graceful, somewhat mysterious elegance and
infused Noh with it. (italics mine, 12-13)

As the passage shows, Japanese Waka and Haikai writers used the term to
mean “a state of subtle, haunting beauty [grace]” that is supposedly
achieved by “suggestiveness.” Like most men of letters in East Asia, they,
too, favored “allusiveness over explicitness and completeness” (SEPO) in
poetry, and considered Yugen as a primary concern in the composition.
Later the concept was more refined into “the highest principle” of artless
art by Zeami in the Noh drama and associated with “the highly refined
culture of the Japanese nobility” (SEPO). Thus, originally in Japanese
poetic tradition Yugen did not have to do with the Zen Buddhist awaken-
ing of ‘the other world beyond’ or the Western aesthetic concept of ‘the
sublime.’ It is only after the Meiji period, when Japan began to concen-
trate her energies to modernize almost all sectors of Japan, following the
model of Western empires, that the term Yugen came to be re-fashioned
and circulated as a Zen Buddhist-Japanese artistic complex in poetry.
Among modern Japanese writers D. T. Suzuki, Okakura Kakuzo, and
Yone Noguchi played a critical role in the vogue of Japanese Zen aesthet-
ics. In The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, which was quite well known in the
Anglo-European literary community in the early twentieth century,
Noguchi quoted different translations of Kaga no Chiyo’s “Morning
Glory” and indicated the limit of Western poets who did not capture “the
real meaning of the poem” (46) in translating Hokku poems:

All round the rope a morning glory clings;

How can I break its beauty’s dainty spell?
I beg for water from a neighbor’s well. (Walsh’s translation 49)
The well-bucket taken away
By the morning-glory--
Alas, water to beg! (Noguchi’s translation 50)

As he understood, Western poets had a tendency to cling to “an exacti-

tude,” so that they did not quite understand the spirit of Hokku writers,
whose “aim, if aim they have, is hardly connected with the thing or matter
actually stated, but it casts a light on the poetical position in which the
writer stands” (44). From his Japanese aesthetic point of view, Walsh and
20 Jihee Han

other translators were unable to catch the beauty of Yugen, suggested

through “the expression of the moods” in which the writer meditates on
the perfect balance of nature: they were just satisfied with translating the
descriptive level of her encounter with a morning glory. To borrow
Noguchi’s metaphor, they looked only at “a spider” (the microcosmic
object) without recognizing “the perfect balance” of Nature (the macro-
cosmic scope) surrounding the spider, including the threads of its web,
“laden with the white summer dews, swaying among the branches of a
tree like an often invisible ghost in the air” (51).
Then what is the real meaning of this Hokku poem “Morning Glory”?
Noguchi argued that the beauty of Japanese Hokku was not “the thought
of pointed saying” but the moment of “enlightenment” where readers can
“reflect to find [their] own identification” (51). Although he did not use
the term Yugen, he connected “the Zen sect of Buddhism” (46) to the pri-
mary aesthetic concern of traditional Haiku writers in order to attach the
philosophical depth to apparently simple Japanese Hokku and also stress
the uniqueness of Japanese poetic spirit. Likewise, in explicating the
same Hokku poem, Suzuki added to the characterization of Yugen the pro-
fundity of Zen Buddhist enlightenment and claimed that each reader
could enjoy being a creator of his/her poem about ‘the other world
beyond,’ practicing his/her own Buddhist meditation.

One summer morning Chiyo the poetess got up early wishing to draw water
from the well. . . . She found the bucket entwined by the blooming morning
glory vine. She was so struck...that she forgot all about her business and
stood before it thoroughly absorbed in contemplation. The only words she
could utter were ‘Oh, the morning glory!’ At the time, the poetess was not
conscious of herself or of the morning glory as standing against [outside]
her. Her mind was filled with the flower, the whole world turned into the
flower, she was the flower itself. . . . The first line, ‘Oh morning glory!’ does
not contain anything intellectual. . . . It is the feeling, pure and simple, and
we may interpret it in any way we like. The following two lines, however,
determine the nature and depth of what was in the mind of the poetess: when
she tells us about going to the neighbor for water we know that she just left
the morning glory as she found it...She does not even dare touch the flower,
much less pluck it, for in her inmost consciousness there is the feeling that
she is perfectly one with reality. . . . When beauty is expressed in terms of
Buddhism, it is a form of self-enjoyment of the suchness of things. Flowers
are flowers, mountains are mountains, I sit here, you stand there, and the
world goes on from eternity to eternity, this is the suchness of things. (106)
 Amygism or Imagism? 21

It is this philosophical potentials of Haiku, provoking the meditative turn

of the reader’s mind and generating never-ending circles of individual
interpretation, that provided Japanese intellectuals with so much pride in
the “higher art of Japan” (Nuguchi 50). Thus, mentioning Western read-
ers’ responses to Buson’s Hokku, which he thought “quite an excellent
Hokku poem” but many Western readers might “wonder where in the
world poetry will come in from a piece of clay beaten by a stick” (47),
Noguchi concluded that “the real meaning of the poem,” that is, the
instant moment of Zen enlightenment, would be very hard for Western
readers who were accustomed to deciphering “the thought of pointed say-
ing” logically (46, 51). In the vogue of Japonism in general and Japanese
Haiku and Noh drama in particular, the traditional idea of Yugen (subtle
grace) began to have a meaning of ‘profound grace’ or ‘profound sublimi-
ty’ of the East in comparison with ‘the sublime’ of the West and to be cir-
culated as an aesthetic and philosophical complex. Of course, it goes
without saying that those Japanese modern intellectuals played a key role
in the way Western intellectuals recognize Japan as “the living continua-
tion of Chinese civilization” (Bush 78). Being an aesthete of Japanese
arts, therefore, it is highly likely that Lowell was well aware of the con-
temporary Japanese poetic trends and actively adapted them in order to
distinguish her Imagist poetics from Pound’s. In this respect it is interest-
ing to read her poem “Patterns” closely and examine how Lowell adapts
Japanese poetic principles and aesthetic ideals for new Imagist modes.

V.  Lowell’s Signature Modes of Imagism in “Patterns”

In “Patterns” Lowell, along with carrying out the general Imagist prin-
ciples such as subtle rhythms, clear, vivid presentation, and concentration,
showcases her artistry of weaving her ideas of “a cadence,” “suggestion,”
“Yugen” and “the real poem beyond” into the fabric of Imagist poetry to
present a female speaker’s psychological drama lively in a three dimen-
sional portrait. To begin with the structure of this poem, Lowell presents a
grief-stricken lady in seven stanzas, where her pent-up emotions are get-
ting more intense and more condensed as each stanza unfolds during a
short span of time right before attending the social event. Here, each stan-
za functions as ‘a pattern’ or what Lowell would call ‘a cadenced verse
with a full swing of emotion.’ While each stanza-pattern proceeds, she
presents a different viewpoint of the lady, following the stream of her
22 Jihee Han

consciousness. Let’s see how the first stanza-pattern reveals Lowell’s idea
of an Imagist verse with “cadences,” or “circles of ideas”:

1) I walk down the garden paths,

And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
2) I walk down the patterned garden paths
in my stiff, brocaded gown.
3) With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. 4) As I wander down
The garden paths. (Selected Poems 23)

The first stanza-pattern is made up of four cadences of interior mono-

logue as my numbering shows. Fit for the first pattern that introduces a
poetic subject, Lowell proceeds each cadence in a natural, dignified way
and leads readers to experience both ‘the physical world here’ (the micro-
cosmic garden) and ‘the other world beyond the poem’ (the macrocosmic
garden of life). For instance, the heroine appears as an elegant lady, wear-
ing such status symbols as “stiff, brocade gown,” “powered hair,” and “a
jewelled fan.” In the descriptive level, she looks dressed up, fitting into
the pattern of an upper class lady who is asked to attend a formal dance.
The lady, thus, seems to be a perfect piece of a social pattern, commonly
displayed in the portraits done by male artists.
In the symbolic level, however, by stressing the particular word “pat-
tern,” Lowell intrigues readers to feel some mysterious atmosphere about
her being because she calls herself “a rare pattern.” What does she mean
by “a rare pattern” in “the patterned garden”? Here, Lowell suggests that
the repetition of the word “pattern” is not a meaningless rhetorical case
but signals a subtle change in the flow of the poetic mood. In other words,
by making nuanced repetitions of the same word “pattern,” Lowell pro-
vides the lady with an aura of authority and at the same time, readers with
the first clue to imagine the psychology of this lady: just as a noble gener-
al, equipped with a helmet, armor, and a sword, prepares himself for a
battle, so she wears a powered wig and “stiff, brocade gown” and holds a
“jewelled fan” to prepare herself ready for the upcoming social battle in
the dance hall. Then, in the last cadence Lowell repeats again the first
cadence with a change of the verb from “walk” to “wander” and com-
pletes the full swing of the first pattern: she finishes making readers ready
for entering the inside of an individual who feels stifled by the patterned
 Amygism or Imagism? 23

life and is willing to fight it.

From the second stanza-pattern to the sixth stanza-pattern, the dramatic
conflict does not occur between a protagonist and a antagonist but only in
this lady’s psychology. Here, Lowell lets the lady describe five different
episodes of her relationship with the deceased Lord in a confessional
mode, reflecting the subtle rhythmic change of her emotions, responding
to each memory. At the same time, using rich and sensuous metaphors
and similes and also making nuanced repetitions and variations of “soft-
ness” and “stiffness,” Lowell presents five different viewpoints in parallel
with the lady’s descriptive confessions so that readers can meditate for
themselves on the main poetic theme, which is a woman’s individual
mind warring against her social consciousness of Womanhood. And, after
completing the full swing of the sixth stanza-pattern, she goes back to the
first stanza-pattern and ends the poem.
What is particularly interesting in the flow of these stanza-patterns is
the fact that Lowell, while using a technique of dramatic monologue, not
only absorbs some of Japanese Noh drama’s features but also subversive-
ly adapts its signifying patterns for her woman-centered viewpoint. First,
she gives the lady a role of a shite, who recites and sings as a main char-
acter in the original Noh drama where a male actor usually plays the part
with a mask. Like this, she takes apart the strict Japanese pattern of gen-
der-based ancient stage and re-assembles a rare American pattern of
trans-gender modern stage. Secondly, she transforms Noh stage’s red and
white color symbol into the “pink” and “silver” symbol of the lady’s
gown to suggest the real stage is the inside of the seemingly genteel
woman: thus, the lady appears to have a soft, pinkish young body, but her
soul shines cool in silver with no illusion of life. Thirdly, in Noh drama a
male actor, wearing a female-mask with a blank look, plays the role of
Kyozo (狂女, a woman gone mad) who mourns over a deceased love, fol-
lowing the traditional plate of a woman’s painful story. However, in order
to carry readers away from the commonly expected sentimental drama to
the modern psychological drama, Lowell focuses on the movement of
feelings and emotions whirling inside the lady’s mind and tries to secure
the realism of the depth of her conflict. Thus, she changes the time and
scene smoothly from the lime tree at present to the same lime tree in the
past by shifting the cadences from the short time unit of “And I weep” to
the long time unit of “For the lime tree . . . upon my bosom” and stressing
the slant rhyme of “blossom” and “bosom.” Then, using a mode of flash-
back, Lowell sets up a still and serene American-style Noh stage, appro-
24 Jihee Han

priate for the lady to confess the never-told fantasy of her passionate love
in the third and fourth stanza-patterns: without fear of breaking the social
pattern as a virtuous lady, she gives a full swing to her feeling of erotic
excitement in an interior monologue. Particularly, in these stanza-patterns
Lowell uses such sensuous images in describing the details of her fantasy
and such rhythmical cadences in manifesting the rhythm of her “aching,
melting, unafraid” heart that readers can easily get mesmerized by the
lady’s confession in the moment of her reaching the climax of the fantasy.
Nevertheless, Lowell soon awakens readers to a grim contrast between
her fantasy of a coupled life and her present reality of being left alone in
the following fifth stanza-pattern. In the first cadence of the fifth stan-
za-pattern she brings in the variation of the last cadence of the second
stanza-pattern: the same lime flower falls on the same bosom of this lady,
but the emotion she feels now beneath the bosom has completely changed
from the excitement to the desperation. Through this technique of sensu-
ous suggestion she not only guides readers to have more empathy toward
the sharp, cutting pain of the lady caused by the beloved’s death, but also
renders the problematic scene of an upper class lady confessing her sexu-
al fantasy not obscene but truthful to her subjective emotions. Further, she
suggests the true nobility of the lady when she treats the messenger with-
out losing her dignity despite being stabbed by the tragic news. Only after
doing the right thing as a lady, she goes back to dress her bleeding “pink”
heart: reciting a cadence after another, composed of short time units and
terse expressions, she tries to wrap it tightly with “the stiffness” of her
gown and cope with her present suffering:

I stood upright too,

Held right to the pattern
by the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down. (Selected Poems 25)

It may be easily expected that with the loss of her beloved, the lady feels
so desperate about the future in which she would spend her life longing
for a vanished happiness of a woman, freed from the stiffness of the
social pattern. Yet Lowell goes a step further and presents the depth of the
lady’s soul who struggles to come to terms with the paradox of wearing
“the stiffness.” In other words, by making a controlled intimation of her
individuality through nuanced repetitions of the same words (“Up and
 Amygism or Imagism? 25

down”) and calm and restrained up-and-down motions of the body, she
draws readers’ attention to the lady’s feminine mystique of Yugen, which
shines out a bit more brightly in the following stanza-pattern.
For the purpose, in the last stanza-pattern Lowell changes the time and
scene again from the past to the present and from the psychological
drama to the social reality. Since she completed the full circle of the
lady’s emotions in the previous stanza-patterns, here she starts a new cir-
cle of portraying a thinking woman from a woman’s point of view:

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk

Up and down
The patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
(Selected Poems 26)

The lady, still walking down the garden path with deep grief in her heart,
reveals the philosophical turn of her mind. As suggested in the second
long cadence, she immerses herself in contemplating the life of garden
flowers: as time passes, each flower does her duty to change the scenery
and finally dies in “snow.” She continues her contemplation: like them,
she, too, is going to get aged and die in time. Yet, at this moment she real-
izes that she herself is another pattern of flower in nature. In this simple
but certainly Emersonian moment of spiritual opening, her mind is filled
with a new energy: looking at herself as a pattern of nature, “boned and
stayed” on the perfect balance with other natural things, in the eternal
recurrence including suffering, she gets her mind “gorgeously arrayed”
enough to deal with the social patterns in the present:

I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
26 Jihee Han

Christ! What are patterns for? (Selected Poems 26)

Thus, while straightening “each button, hook, and lace” in the slow
cadences, she reveals her changed point of view on life: if a man lives his
pattern of reality “called a war,” she thinks it is perfectly fine with her
reality of fighting the social patterns alone. Finally, she lets her voice
heard in crying out “Christ! What are patterns for?” and expresses her
sense of utmost freedom. Here ends the poem, but ‘the real poem beyond’
begins now in readers’ imagination. How is she going to enjoy her libera-
tion? Is she going to be all right in her battles of life? No one can hear
anything more, but Lowell’s poem makes a distinctive echo-effect on the
minds of readers: thanks to the impression of the quiet graceful Yugen-
beauty of the lady, manifested in the drama of her deep soul searching,
they may conceive of the business of living with the painful but beautiful
memories of the beloved in an enlightened way, and start weaving their
real poems, namely, their own patterns of life beyond the poetic patterns
that Lowell wove with her circles of ideas. Then, it cannot be denied that
Lowell’s poetic portrait of a lady is neither a “fruity” inferior imitation of
male artists nor a “facile” appropriation of Japanese poetry. Rather, truth-
fully it exemplifies her vision of free-style Imagist poetry as well as her
modernist experiments of adapting Japanese aesthetics for Imagist poetics
without falling into Victorian sentimentality.

VI.  Conclusion

As is examined so far, this paper made an attempt to re-consider

Lowell’s Imagism in an objective light, freed from the prejudiced shadow
of “Amygism.” Although Lowell’s Imagist discourse may sound simple
in comparison with Pound’s, it cannot be denied that she produced anoth-
er kind of Imagism, reflecting her class habitus, aesthetics East and West,
and her literary passion to present women’s experiences of the modern
world from a woman’s view point. She showed a clear vision of Imagist
poetry in the process of developing new poetic principles of “a cadenced
verse,” “suggestion” and “the real poem beyond” and served her role
greatly in making the flat, outmoded cadence of Victorian poetry alive
with modern views and rhythms. Moreover, it should be pointed that she
displayed a political capability to connect the challenging spirit of Imagist
poets to the independent spirit of America, thence carrying out the tradi-
 Amygism or Imagism? 27

tion of the Emersonian poet. In this respect, although Pound broke the
ground of “Imagisme,” she may be viewed as the one who actually
moved the stage further by stressing the artist’s freedom to present “a dif-
ferent standpoint” whether “moral, religious [or] artistic” (Tendencies
236, 238).
In the end, although another paper needs to be written to illuminate
Lowell in the tradition of “good minor” woman-poets, one thing is clear.
Thanks to her indefatigable zeal to resuscitate old poetry with a new
Imagist polyphony of blending Western poetics and Eastern aesthetics
together, three volumes of “Some Imagist Poets” came out in 1915, 1916,
and 1917 and became “the germ, the nucleus of the school” (Tendencies
255). And as she predicted in Tendencies, those “native flowers” of
Imagism, “sprung out of a new graft upon an old stock” (237, 280) grew
into unforgettable characters on the rough American terrain of New
Poetry in the early twentieth century. Given her considerable contribution
to the development of Imagism into a literary movement, then, she
deserves a place in the history of American poetic modernism.

Gyeongsang National University

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28 Jihee Han

Lowell, Amy. Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917). New York:

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*Received: 14 June 2018./Reviewed: 14 June 2018./Accepted: 26 June 2018.

 Amygism or Imagism? 29

Abstract

This paper, postulating that Lowell’s Imagism is not some “Amygism”

that wobbles with “emotional slither,” “mushy technique” and “general
floppiness” as Pound once mocked, but another kind of poetic discourse
that deserves the fullest re-consideration, goes back to the very scene
where Pound left for Vorticism, condescendingly allowing Lowell and her
supporters to use the name “Imagism” for three years. There, it tries to
illuminate how Lowell, making the most of the opportunity given to her,
picked up what Pound had left behind, grafted it on the soil of America,
and finally fulfilled her literary passion to awaken the common reading
public to the taste for poetry reading. For the purpose, it looks into her
critical reviews in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, and stresses her
creative critical efforts to re-address Pound’s principles of “Imagisme.” In
particular, given the limit of space, it focuses only on the second principle
of her Imagism and examines the modernity of her concepts of “a
cadence,” “suggestion,” and “the real poem beyond.” Then it reads
“Patterns” in the context of Japanese poetry and Noh drama and analyzes
the poetic patterns that Lowell made through a creative adaptation of
Japanese aesthetics for Imagist poetics. In doing so, this paper aims to
provide reasonable evidences to evaluate the modernity of Lowell’s
Imagist ars poetica and to consider her a truly serious Imagist poet wor-
thy of a place in the history of American poetic modernism.
Key Words: Amy Lowell, Imagism, Adaptation, Imagist Polyphony, Yugen
Notes on Contributor: 
Jihee Han  is a Professor of English at Gyeongsang National University.
She has published many papers and books on modern American poets,
Comparative World Literature, Korean Literature and Culture. Currently,
she is doing research on modern American poets and the translation of the
East.
Email: taomelus@naver.com