A. Critical and Comparative Studies

62. Record, Alison Kirby. ‘Haiku Genre: The Nature and Origins of English Haiku’. PhD thesis, Indiana University, 1984. Abstract in DAI 44/12: 3679A.

Kirby traces ‘the historical development and aesthetic nature of English-language haiku’ and compares this to the ‘Japanese prototype’, arguing that while the form has exercised a ‘significant influence on modern English-language poetry’ from the time of Pound’s definitions of Imagism (see particularly BK1, 2, and 12), ‘haiku poets’ writing in English ‘have either discarded the classical principles’ or have ‘transformed them almost beyond recognition’. The result is that ‘haiku’ in English ‘bears little or no resemblance to the Japanese model’.