A. Critical and Comparative Studies

26. Meredith, William. ‘Listening to Incense, in Translation’. Review of The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (A25), by Earl Miner. Hudson Review 11 (1958): 312-14.

Advances the thesis that ‘Western interest in Japan has been characterized by a deep and abiding illiteracy’, and finds many of the works Miner discusses ‘as amusing as they are insignificant’, for writers such as Edwin Arnold (see CA1), Noguchi (D15), and Ficke have been ‘overtaken [by] oblivion’ not because they were ‘inferior orientalists’ but because their works have ‘died of native English or American maladies’. Meredith is more forgiving of Miner’s treatment of Pound and Yeats, but still finds his study ‘a little wilful . . . as a work of scholarship’.