Five Legendary Emperors.2852-2205B.C.Hsia Dynasty.2205-1766B.C.Shang Dynasty.1766-1122B.C.Chou Dynasty.1122- 255B.C.Ch'in Dynasty.255- 206B.C.Han Dynasty.206B.C.-A.D.25Eastern Han Dynasty.A.D.25-221Later Han Dynasty.A.D.221-264Chin Dynasty.A.D.264-420Period of Unrest, Six Short-lived Dynasties.A.D.420-618T'ang Dynasty.A.D.618-906The Five Dynasties:A.D.906-960Posterior Liang.Posterior T'ang.Posterior Chin.Posterior Han.Posterior Chou.Sung Dynasty.A.D.960-1277Yüan Dynasty.A.D.1277-1368Ming Dynasty.A.D.1368-1644Ch'ing Dynasty.A.D.1644-1912Min Kuo (Republic of China).A.D.1912
The Riverside PressCAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTSU.S.A
The following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author
Books byAmy Lowell
PUBLISHED BY
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Poetry
LEGENDS
PICTURES OF THE FLOATING WORLD
CAN GRANDE'S CASTLE
MEN, WOMEN AND GHOSTS
SWORD BLADES AND POPPY SEED
A DOME OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS
(IN COLLABORATION WITH FLORENCE AYSCOUGH)
FIR-FLOWER TABLETS: POEMS TRANSLATED FROM THE CHINESE
Prose
TENDENCIES IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY
SIX FRENCH POETS: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Can Grande's Castle
By AMY LOWELL
Fourth edition
"The poems In 'Can Grande's Castle' are only four in number, but two of them ... touch magnificence. 'The Bronze Horses' has a larger sweep than Miss Lowell has ever attempted; she achieves here a sense of magnitude and time that is amazing.... Not in all contemporary poetry has the quality of balance and return been so beautifully illustrated."—Louis UntermeyerinThe New Era in American Poetry.
"'Can Grande's Castle' challenges, through its vividness and contagious zest in life and color, an unreluctant admiration ... its rare union of vigor and deftness, precision and flexibility, imaginative grasp and clarity of detail."—Professor John Livingston LowesinConvention and Revolt in Poetry.
"'Sea-Blue and Blood-Red' and 'Guns as Keys: and the Great Gate Swings' ... are such a widening of barriers they bring into literature an element imperceptible in poetry before ... the epic of modernity concentrated into thirty pages.... Not since the Elizabethans has such a mastery of words been reached in English ... one had never surmised such enchantment could have been achieved with words."—W. BryherinThe Art of Amy Lowell. A Critical Appreciation. London.
"The essential element of Miss Lowell's poetry is vividness, vividness and a power to concentrate into a few pages the spirit of an age. She indicates perfectly the slightest sense of atmosphere in a period or a city.... But the spirit of these poems is not the fashioning of pictures, however brilliant, of the past; it is the re-creation of epic moments of history made real as this present through her own individuality and vision."—The London Nation.
"We have come to it—once Poe was the living and commanding poet, whose things were waited for.... Now we watch and wait for Amy Lowell's poems. Success justifies her work.... Each separate poem in 'Can Grande's Castle' is a real and true poem of remarkable power—a work of imagination, a moving and beautiful thing."—Joseph E. ChamberlaininThe Boston Transcript.
"'Can Grande's Castle' is, in the opinion of the present reviewer, not only the best book which Miss Lowell has so far written, but a great book per se.... It is a frank and revealing book. It deals with fundamentals.... In 'Sea-Blue and Blood-red' we have the old story of Nelson and 'mad, whole-hearted Lady Hamilton' retold in a style that dazzles and excites like golden standards won from the enemy passing in procession with the sun upon them."—The New York Times Book Review.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
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Legends
By AMY LOWELL
Second Printing
"I read 'Legends' last night, and again this morning. I like them the best of all your poems.... I like bestMany Swans, which I have read twice and which I feel really speaks inside my unexplained soul. I should not like to try to explain it, because of the deep fear and danger that is in it. But it isn't a myth of the sun, it is something else. All the better that we can't say offhand what. That means it is true. It rings a note in my soul."—D. H. Lawrence.
"The subjects fit the poet like a glove.... The book is highly original, immensely interesting, and in its choice of themes, of the first significance."—Prof. John Livingston Lowes inThe New York Evening Post.
"These clever dramatic tales are so brilliantly successful that we can only hope for more of their kind. Here is a canvas broad enough for the strokes of that untiring brush! Both in subject-matter and technique Miss Lowell has surpassed herself in these legends."—John Farrar inThe Bookman.
"Miss Lowell builds—or composes—her poems as well as a painter of the first rank.... Her verse becomes increasingly supple.... I cannot say pompously that this latest volume contains Miss Lowell's best work, but it contains her work that I like best.... She is, at any rate, one of the three graces or nine muses upon whom our poetry stands or falls."—Malcolm Cowley inThe Dial.
"There is no writer in America to-day, of either prose or poetry, who can manage such brilliant color effects in description.... In 'Legends' she has produced weirdly beautiful work that could never by any possibility be mistaken for the work of anyone else."—William Rose Benét inThe Yale Review.
"'Legends' is, I think, Miss Lowell's best book ... the book that achieves the idiom, the convention that makes her work integral."—Padraic Colum inThe Freeman.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
Sword Blades and Poppy Seed
By AMY LOWELL
Fifth edition
OPINIONS OF LEADING REVIEWERS
"Against the multitudinous array of daily verse our times produce this volume utters itself with a range and brilliancy wholly remarkable. I cannot see that Miss Lowell's use of unrhymedvers librehas been surpassed in English. Read 'The Captured Goddess,' 'Music' and 'The Precinct. Rochester,' a piece of mastercraft in this kind. A wealth of subtleties and sympathies, gorgeously wrought, full of macabre effects (as many of the poems are) and brilliantly worked out. The things of splendor she has made she will hardly outdo in their kind."—Josephine Preston Peabody,The Boston Herald.
"For quaint pictorial exactitude and bizarrerie of color these poems remind one of Flemish masters and Dutch tulip gardens; again, they are fine and fantastic, like Venetian glass; and they are all curiously flooded with the moonlight of dreams.... Miss Lowell has a remarkable gift of what one might call the dramatic-decorative. Her decorative imagery is intensely dramatic, and her dramatic pictures are in themselves vivid and fantastic decorations."—Richard Le Gallienne,New York Times Book Review.
"Such poems as 'A Lady,' 'Music,' 'White and Green,' are wellnigh flawless in their beauty—perfect 'images.'"—Harriet Monroe,Poetry.
"Her most notable quality appears in the opening passage of the volume. The sharply etched tones and contours of this picture are characteristic of the author's work.... In 'unrhymed cadence' Miss Lowell's cadences are sometimes extremely delicate, as in 'The Captured Goddess.'"—Arthur Davison Ficke,Chicago Dial.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry
By AMY LOWELL
Fourth Printing, illustrated
"I have no hesitation in insisting that Miss Amy Lowell's 'Tendencies in Modern American Poetry' is one of the most striking volumes of criticism that has appeared in recent years."—Clement K. ShorterinThe Sphere, London.
"In her recent volume, 'Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,' Miss Lowell employs this method (the historical) with excellent results.... We feel throughout a spirit of mingled courage, kindness, and independence illuminating the subject, and the result is the note of personality that is so priceless in criticism, yet which, unhoneyed on the one hand or uncrabbed on the other, is so hard to come by ... her latest book leaves with the reader a strong impression of the most simple and unaffected integrity."—Helen Bullis KizerinThe North American Review.
"A new criticism has to be created to meet not only the work of the new artists but also the uncritical hospitality of current taste.... That is why a study such as Miss Amy Lowell's on recent tendencies in American verse is so significant.... Her very tone is revolutionary.... Poetry appears for the first time on our critical horizon ... as a sound and important activity of contemporary American life."—Randolf BourneinThe Dial.
"Its real worth as criticism and its greater worth as testimony are invaluable."—O. W. FirkinsinThe Nation.
"The feeling she has for poetry is so genuine and catholic and instructed, and her acquaintance with modern activity so energetic, that she is one of the most interesting and illuminating persons with whom to visit the new poets, led by the hand."—New Republic.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
Men, Women, and Ghosts
By AMY LOWELL
Fifth edition
"... In the poem which gave its name to a previous volume, 'Sword Blades and Poppy Seed,' Miss Lowell uttered her Credo with rare sincerity and passion. Not since Elizabeth Barrett's 'Vision of Poets' has there been such a confession of faith in the mission of poetry, such a stern compulsion of dedication laid upon the poet. And in her latest work we find proof that she has lived according to her confession and her dedication with a singleness of purpose seldom encountered in our fluid time.
"'Men, Women, and Ghosts' is a book greatly and strenuously imagined.... Miss Lowell is a great romantic.... She belongs to the few who, in every generation, feel that poetry is a high calling, and who press undeviatingly toward the mark. They are few, and they are frequently lonely, but they lead."—New York Times Book Review.
"... 'The Hammers' is a really thrilling piece of work; the skill with which it is divided into different moods and motifs is something more than a tour de force. The way the different hammers are characterized and given voice, the varying music wrung from them (from the ponderous banging of the hammers at the building of the 'Bellerophon' to their light tapping as they pick off the letters of Napoleon's victories on the arch of the Place du Carrousel), the emphasis with which they reveal a whole period—these are the things one sees rarely."—Louis Untermeyerin theChicago Evening Post.
"... Beautiful ... poetry as authentic as any we know. It is individual, innocent of echo and imitation, with the uniqueness that comes of personal genius.... Miss Lowell strives to get into words the effects of the painter's palette and the musician's score. And life withal. Does she succeed? I should say she does, and the first poem in this book, 'Patterns,' is a brilliant, æsthetic achievement in a combination of story, imagism, and symbolism. 'Men, Women, and Ghosts' is a volume that contains beautiful poetry for all readers who have the root of the matter in them."—Reedy's Mirror, St. Louis.
"The most original of all the young American writers of to-day."—The New Age, London.
"Brilliant is the term for 'Men, Women, and Ghosts'—praise which holds good when the book is put to the test of a third reading."—Edward GarnettinThe Atlantic Monthly.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass
By AMY LOWELL
Fifth edition
"These poems arouse interest, and justify it by the result. Miss Lowell is the sister of President Lowell of Harvard. Her art, however, needs no reflection from such distinguished influence to make apparent its distinction. Such verse as this is delightful, has a sort of personal flavour, a loyalty to the fundamentals of life and nationality.... The child poems are particularly graceful."—Boston Evening Transcript, Boston, Mass.
"Miss Lowell has given expression in exquisite form to many beautiful thoughts, inspired by a variety of subjects and based on some of the loftiest ideals....
"The verses are grouped under the captions 'Lyrical Poems,' 'Sonnets,' and 'Verses for Children.'...
"It is difficult to say which of these are the most successful. Indeed, all reveal Miss Lowell's powers of observation from the view-point of a lover of nature. Moreover, Miss Lowell writes with a gentle philosophy and a deep knowledge of humanity....
"The sonnets are especially appealing and touch the heart strings so tenderly that there comes immediate response in the same spirit....
"That she knows the workings of the juvenile mind is plainly indicated by her verses written for their reading."—Boston Sunday Globe, Boston, Mass.
"A quite delightful little collection of verses."—Toronto Globe, Toronto, Canada.
"The Lyrics are true to the old definition; they would sing well to the accompaniment of the strings. We should like to hear 'Hora Stellatrix' rendered by an artist."—Hartford Courant, Hartford, Conn.
"Verses that show delicate appreciation of the beautiful, and imaginative quality. A sonnet entitled 'Dreams' is peculiarly full of sympathy and feeling."—The Sun, Baltimore, Md.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
Six French Poets
STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
By AMY LOWELL
Third edition, illustrated
A brilliant series of biographical and critical essays dealing with Emile Verhaeren, Albert Samain, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Régnier, Francis Jammes, and Paul Fort, by one of the foremost living American poets. The translations make up an important part of the book, and together with the French originals constitute a representative anthology of the poetry of the period.
William Lyon Phelps, Professor of English Literature, Yale University, says:
"This is, I think, the most valuable work on contemporary French literature that I have seen for a long time. It is written by one who has a thorough knowledge of the subject and who is herself an American poet of distinction. She has the knowledge, the sympathy, the penetration, and the insight—all necessary to make a notable book of criticism. It is a work that should be widely read in America."
"In her 'Six French Poets' I find a stimulating quality of a high order.... I defy any English critic to rise from this book without the feeling that he has gained considerably. This is the first volume in English to contain a minute and careful study of these French writers."—Clement K. ShorterinThe Sphere, London.
"I can conceive of no greater pleasure than that of a lover of poetry who reads in Miss Lowell's book about modern French poetry for the first time; it must be like falling into El Dorado."—F. S. Flint, formerly French critic ofPoetry and Drama, London, inThe Little Review.
"Amy Lowell's 'French Poets' ... ought to be labelled like Pater's studies 'Appreciations,' so full of charm are its penetrative interpretations ... and it is not too bold to say that her introductions to and interpretations of French poets will live as long as interest in these poets themselves lives. Her book is a living and lasting piece of criticism ... a masterly volume."—New York Sun.
"A very admirable piece of work."—The London Bookman.
"Une très interessante étude."—La France.
"An excellent book."—Emile CammaertsinThe Athenæum, London.
"Miss Lowell has done a real service to literature. One must be limited, indeed, who fails to appreciate the power of these writers as set forth through the comment, the discriminating extracts, and the appended prose translations in her book."—North American Review.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK