A. Critical and Comparative Studies

43. Rexroth, Kenneth. ‘Classic Japanese Poetry’. In Classics Revisited. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968. Reprint, New York: New Directions, 1986.

Rexroth surveys Japanese poetic tradition and suggests that ‘possibly the greatest single influence on the poetry of the West since Baudelaire has come from . . . Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation’. The generation of poets who came of age in the early decades of the century ‘accepted Far Eastern poetry as the very matter of fact of their art’, and ‘a whole section of Western European verse after the First War occupies the same universe of discourse as that of Tu Fu [Jpn.: To Ho] or Hitomaro’. Includes disparaging comment about the profusion of Western-language ‘haiku’ after the Second World War.