A. Critical and Comparative Studies

8. Taketomo, Torao. ‘American Imitations of Japanese Poetry’. Nation (New York) 110 (1920): 70-72.

Taketomo asserts an ‘undeniable imitation of the old Japanese poetry in the new poetry of America [and Britain]’, and mentions specifically work by Aldington, Crapsey (see CA4), Fletcher, Lowell, and Pound, along with passing reference to Yeats, ‘whose deep insight reached at last to the essence of Oriental life’. This is the first work to note the ‘strangeness’ of the fact that English-language poets ‘in their search for freedom, and in their effort to escape from their own traditional poetry, should have found the poems [tanka and hokku] which to the Japanese seem to limit freedom’. Includes what is also the first of several speculative suggestions that poems by H. D. demonstrate an influence from Japan (see also 11, 16, 23, 31, and 63).