A. Critical and Comparative Studies

12. Snow, Royall. ‘Marriage with the East’. New Republic 27 (1921): 138-40.

Finds that emphasis on ‘concentration’ and ‘suggestion’ in contemporary poetry in English has its genesis at least in part in interest in Japanese poetry, especially ‘hokku’. Examples are taken from work by Lowell and Crapsey (see CA4). Follows Taketomo (A8) in identifying Crapsey’s debt to early translations of Japanese verse, though the ‘famous’ poem attributed to Buson, from which Crapsey’s Trapped probably derives, is in fact by Issa. The translation cited is that done by Chamberlain (see D5a), who makes clear whose work is being translated, but, strangely, Snow’s erroneous attribution is repeated both in Eunice Tietjens’s Poetry of the Orient (New York: Knopf, 1928), in which the poem appears, and in Bynner’s review of that work (BE8).