A. Critical and Comparative Studies

40. Kanaseki, Hisao. ‘Haiku and Modern American Poetry’. East-West Review 3 (1967-68): 223-41.

A useful antidote to works that find an ‘essential haiku spirit’ or an ‘intimate understanding of the inner life of Japan’ in the haiku adaptations of Anglo-American and Irish Modernism. With intelligence, wit, and a firm grasp both of the Japanese and the English-language tradition, Kanaseki sets forth his view that ‘it is impossible to write haiku in a language other than Japanese’. Takes particular exception to the suggestion in Pound (in BK12), and in Miner writing about Pound (in A25), that a technique of super-posing ‘seeming contrasts’ has anything to do with Japanese poetic tradition. Finds that in its ‘extreme succinctness and understatement . . . its direct treatment of subjects and . . . emphasis on imagery’, haiku has influenced modern Anglo-American writers such as Aldington, Fletcher, Flint (Ap), Lowell, and Pound, but has not been and could not be ‘assimilated’ in any work written in English.