Amy Lowell made her name in the early twentieth century as a champion of Imagism, a movement that prized hard, clear images and economy over Victorian sentiment. She was also deeply drawn to East Asian art and literature; “An Artist” first appeared in her 1919 collection *Pictures of the Floating World*, a book shaped by Japanese subjects and aesthetics. That context matters because the poem itself behaves like the kind of art Lowell admired: spare, disciplined, and quietly ruthless.
The story is only four lines long. A Japanese religious recluse, Kisen, writes a thousand poems, discards nine hundred and ninety-nine of them into a river, and keeps a single one he considers worthy. On the surface it is an anecdote about extreme artistic self-criticism. But Lowell’s framing turns it into something more than a legend. She calls Kisen “The anchorite,” a word that suggests withdrawal from the world for spiritual reasons. His art is not made for applause; it is a private discipline, almost a form of prayer. The act of throwing poems into the river is not a tantrum but a purification, a deliberate return of the unworthy to flowing water.
The poem’s construction mirrors its argument. Lowell uses free verse, so the rhythm comes from line length and syntax rather than meter or rhyme. The opening line, “The anchorite, Kisen,” is short and still, as if introducing a figure in a woodblock print. The next two lines stretch out: “Composed a thousand poems / And threw nine hundred and ninety-nine into the river.” That enormous number makes the line itself feel crowded, the mouth working through the repeated *n* sounds of “nine hundred and ninety-nine” as if counting an exhausting pile of failures. Then the final line, “Finding one alone worthy of preservation,” is shorter and smoother, a release from all that clutter. The movement from long to short enacts the winnowing: after the noise of the discarded many, the one remains almost effortless.
Lowell’s word choices sharpen the central idea. “Composed” has a careful, deliberate weight, while “threw” is abrupt and physical. The word “alone” does double work. It describes the single surviving poem, but it also glances at the anchorite himself—alone by the river, alone in his standards. “Worthy of preservation” sounds almost formal, like a museum label, yet it is attached to something we never see. We are never told what the one poem says. That omission is the heart of the piece. What matters is not the poem’s content but the criterion that almost everything failed to meet.
“An Artist” is significant because it works as a compact ars poetica, a poem about the making of poems. Lowell aligns herself with Kisen’s severity: better to offer one hard-won image than to bury readers under slack language. The poem also embodies its own lesson. It survives on four short lines, and every extra word feels as if it has already been thrown into the river. At the same time, there is a gentle irony. Kisen’s thousand poems are mostly lost, yet Lowell preserves the story of their destruction, making the act of rejection as lasting as any kept verse. The poem offers a useful challenge—not every draft deserves to live, and learning what to discard is part of becoming an artist.