An Artist — Summary

Amy Lowell turns a legend about the hermit-poet Kisen into a tiny fable about artistic self-judgment. Kisen writes a thousand poems, then throws all but one into the river. The speaker doesn’t mourn the lost poems or explain what made the survivor worthy; she simply lets the stark fact stand. The mood is quiet, severe, and solitary — you can almost feel the anchorite alone with his exacting standards. There is no celebration here, only the weight of rejecting nearly everything he made. Lowell seems to admire, or at least respect, such unforgiving discipline. The river becomes an image of erasure and refusal, and the one saved poem feels less like a success than a hard-won act of honesty. The poem lingers because it asks what you would keep if you had to discard almost everything else.