2. In judging her work, consider separately her poems in regular metrical form and those in free verse. Decide which method is better suited to her type of imagination.
3. To what extent does her inspiration come from cultural sources—travel, literature, art, music?
4. Consider especially her presentation of “images.” How far do these seem to be derived from direct experience? Test them by your own experience. What principles seem to determine her choice of details? Which sense impressions—sight, sound, taste, smell, touch—does she most frequently and successfully suggest? Note instances where her figures of speech sharpen the imagery and others where they seem to distort it. In what ways is the influence of Keats perceptible in her work?
5. It is worth while to make special study of the historical imagery of the poems in Can Grande’s Castle.
6. If you are familiar with the impressionistic method of painting, work out an analogy between it and Miss Lowell’s word pictures.
7. Study separately her varieties of free verse and polyphonic prose (cf. her study of Paul Fort and the preface to Can Grande’s Castle). Choose several poems in which you think the free verse form is especially adapted to the content and draw conclusions as to the problems of development of this kind of verse or of its possible influence upon regular metrical forms.
8. Use the following poem by Miss Lowell as a basis for judging her work:
Fragment
What is poetry? Is it a mosaic
Of colored stones which curiously are wrought
Into a pattern? Rather glass that’s taught
By patient labor any hue to take
And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make
Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught,
Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught
With storied meaning for religion’s sake.
9. In summing up Miss Lowell’s achievement, consider the different phases of it that appear in her volumes taken in chronological order, noting the successive influences under which she has come. In what qualities does she stand out strikingly from other contemporary poets? Do you expect different and more important work from her in the future?