Summary of the September 12 Lecture

"Japanese Arts and the Formation of American Imagism - in Amy Lowell's Case", by Dr. Naoki Onishi

In the absence of our President, Dr. Suleski, who is on an extended tour taking him to campuses in the USA and England and to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and of our Senior Vice-President, Dr. Douglas Kenrick, the September meeting was presided over by Mr. Aaron Cohen, Chairman of the Organization Committee, who first made the regular announcements and then introduced our speaker, Dr. Naoki Onishi of International Christian University. Dr. Onishi had taken as his subject "Japanese Arts and the Formation of American Imagism - in Amy Lowell's Case"; a paper of his on that subject appeared earlier this year in a Festschrift in ICU honouring Dr. Edward Kidder who retired this year from ICU and from the Asiatic Society Council.

Dr. Onishi began by recalling that he had first read Amy Lowell's letters at Harvard in 1989, when he was seeking some diversion from the pedestrian quality of the Puritan literature he was researching there. He found that Amy Lowell (1874-1925) had first become interested in Japanese culture through her brother Percival (1855-1916), who, following in the footsteps of William Sturgis Bigelow, who had written two books on his travels in Japan, came to Japan in 1883 and stayed for ten years, travelling around in a carefree way and writing books which were the envy of writers Lafcadio Hearn and Basil Chamberlain (and also becoming a member of the Asiatic Society of Japan). Amy was only nine when Percival came to Japan and sent her letters from there; 34 of his letters to Amy are in the Houghton Library at Harvard, nine of them from Japan, written on "washi" (Japanese handmade paper). These letters, such as one in 1891 about fireflies being sold at a street festival, made a great impression on her. We also learn that they enclosed various artifacts, as Amy wrote later that every mail brought a letter with things like a print or a "kakemono" (wall hanging), and these affected her imagination. Her interest in Japanese culture was crystallized by reading his book "The Soul of the Far East", published in 1889, which formed her aesthetic understanding of the Japanese arts. In it he wrote that a Japanese painting is a poem, not a picture; it intentionally omits all irrelevant details.

Amy began to write poems when she was 28. Her first book of poetry, "A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass", was published in 1912 and contained two poems on Japanese subjects, "A Japanese Wood-Carving" and "A Coloured Print by Sokei", though the approach in them is rather superficial. Her interest in woodblock prints was further stimulated in 1915, when she received a book "Chats on Japanese Prints" from its author Arthur Davison Ficke. In writing to thank him for the book she said that it had inspired her to write some little "hokku", or Japanese-style three-line haiku poems. This was what stimulated her to write many hokku, quite different in style from her first two poems; they are all short, in a crystallized form like Japanese haiku, and were put together and published in a book "The Pictures of the Floating World" in 1919. Other poems in the same style were "Twenty-Four Hokku on a Modern Theme", published in her last book, "What's O'Clock", in 1925.

Her most significant poem on a Japanese theme is "Guns and Keys; and the Great Gate Swings", composed in 1917 and published in Can Grande's "Castle" in 1918, which takes as its subject Commodore Perry's coming to Japan. The poem depicts the encounter between two cultures, American capitalism and technology and Japanese aestheticism, the artistic sensibility of Japan as against the artistic ignorance of America. She called her style "polyphonic", in that it had recurring themes like the counterpoint in music. For her facts she based herself on Perry's own report of his expedition in the frigate Mississippi, which stopped at Madeira, Cape Town, Mauritius and Singapore on the way. She faithfully follows this document in many of its details, as when speaking, for example, of the sweet smells of the heliotrope and geranium hedges of Madeira and its ox-drawn sledges clattering over cobbles. Even though she trimmed Perry's prosaic style, it still shows through, for example, in the salty conversation of the sailors at St. Helena, seeing pigs rooting in the Emperor's bedroom. In this case she has inserted the passage deliberately in order to make a contrast with the following scene in Japan, where elegant ladies are visiting Asakusa "to gaze at peonies".

The poem also includes twelve glimpses of Japanese scenes unrelated to Perry's mission, and inserted for the sake of contrast with the prosaic narrative passages. The first is a poetical reproduction of one of Hokusai's "Thirty-Six Views of Fuji", in which three men are trying to link arms around the trunk of a huge pine tree, with Mt. Fuji in the background (Dr. Onishi showed a slide of this print). Amy describes the scene in nineteen lines; in later years she might perhaps have compressed this into a hokku, but at least she captures the peacefulness of the scene. The poem continues in this way, interjecting Japanese scenes in between the narrative of Perry's voyage. One is a long scene of a "harakiri" (self disembowelment and beheading), taken from a book "Schoolboy Days in Japan" by Andre Laurie, published in Boston in 1895, where Amy almost directly quotes a passage in which the executioner gives the condemned man the consolation of perishing by his own accustomed sword. The poem ends with two pieces of news events which occurred in 1903, just 50 years after Perry's visit, and can be said to typify the results of this visit. One is the suicide of Fujimura Misao, who jumped over the Kegon Falls after inscribing a poem on a tree. The other describes a crowd of people gathered to see James Whistler's exhibition in New York. Thus "Guns and Keys" turns out to be a sort of collage, in which Amy skillfully takes a bicultural position without expressing any judgment about the cultural encounter.

We can take this poem as representing her struggle to develop her real imagistic style, revealing a transformation in her poetic technique. This resulted in a poetry of brevity that came to birth two years later in "The Pictures of the Floating World". In contrast to her previous poems, which took ukiyoe prints as their sources and rendered them faithfully in words, these later poems are products of her imagination. She no longer describes the prints, but expresses her own feeling in response to them in a "hokku"-like manner, showing Japanese sensibility. Whereas before she used "he" or "she", she now uses "I". Dr. Onishi took as examples two poems that appeared under the subtitle "Haichuu no Fuji" (Fuji in a Cup), in which an old man is holding out a cup of sake in which the outline of Mt. Fuji is clearly reflected. Amy changes the feeling completely by writing "Being thirsty, I filled a cup with water, And behold! Fuji-yama lay upon the water Like a dropped leaf!" In the other poem, entitled "Pilgrims Ascending Fuji-yama", she writes of "falling showers of ashes Dislodged by my feet", which hardly suggest a Japanese source. Dr. Onishi happened to find a possible source for this in "Jinrikisha Days in Japan" by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, published in 1891. In a chapter entitled "The Ascent of Fujiyama", the author says that the cinders on Fuji are so sacred that whatever dust is carried down on the pilgrims' feet by day is miraculously returned by night. So it seems as if Amy took this episode and converted it into her own experience.

But other poems in this collection, such as "Nuance" or "Autumn Haze", have no reference to Japan. It is not the subject but the style that is Japanese; Amy is trying to adapt the Japanese method to her own imaginative purposes.

Her last "Japanese" poems are "Twenty-Four Hokku on a Modern Theme", included in "What's O'Clock", published in 1925, the year of her death. These are in fact love poems in a Japanese style to her housemate Ada Russell, which are said by some critics to express lesbian feelings. Here she maintains a strict 5-7-5 syllable count in the hokku style, and can be said to have internalized the hokku for her own individual artistic purposes.

In writing about Imagism, Amy Lowell summed up the features of the Imagist style as being simplicity and directness of speech, subtlety and beauty of rhythm, individualistic freedom of idea, clearness and vividness of presentation, and concentration - a principle that certainly comes close to that of the hokku, except that a true hokku must also contain a seasonal word (kigo), which Amy's poems do not. Nevertheless she should be commended for her pioneering attempts to express herself in a foreign medium.

It cannot be said that Japanese arts stimulated the formation of American Imagism; it was a movement which tried to free itself of old restraints, and would have come to birth without involvement with Japanese arts. However, it was enriched by Japonisme, which functioned as a sort of catalyst.

Perhaps the time has come to reevaluate Amy Lowell's achievement. In 1955 Louis Untermeyer wrote in his introduction to her complete works that it was likely that she would be enthusiastically rediscovered by succeeding generations.

A short but searching question period followed, and the meeting was brought to a close with a vote of thanks proposed by Dr. Raffaele Roncalli.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 8", October 1994, compiled by Hugh Wilkinson.
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