Inspired by his son's travels, Longfellow greatly expanded his previously Eurocentric conception of "world literature" to include many other regions of the world, as manifested in the volumes on Asia and Africa he included in his 31-volume mega-anthology Poems of Places (1876-1879). Longfellow had discovered these two poems in an article on "Ancient Japanese Poetry" in the October 1870 issue of The Westminster Review.
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