A. Critical and Comparative Studies

15. Fujita, Jun. ‘A Japanese Cosmopolite’. Poetry 20 (1922): 162-64.

In discussion of Noguchi (D15) Fujita (Ap) draws general conclusions about the ‘so-called oriental influence in western literature today’. He is ‘afraid’ that it ‘is taking the form it has assumed in the other arts, which . . . have adopted the carcass of Japanese pictures and missed the essence’. The ‘hokku’, particularly, requires an ‘illusive mood’ absent both in Noguchi’s work and in European and American imitations, for the ‘seventeen syllable . . . form does not make a hokku’. Japanese poems are ‘not condensed milk’, and the work of Noguchi and Amy Lowell ‘miss[es] the essential quality of the type’.