BA. Conrad Aiken and Japan

		The study of Aiken’s use of Japanese materials, more than for others of his time, must confront the degree to which formal techniques are derived from Japanese models, and in this matter evidence for at least an indirect influence is clear.

Conrad Aiken’s Japanese interests date from his student days at Harvard and his work during that time, along with John Gould Fletcher and T. S. Eliot, at the Harvard Advocate. In a letter to Earl Miner written in the early 1950s (18) Aiken remembered that by 1909 he and others at the Advocate were aware of Ernest Fenollosa (see D10) and the Japanese collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and that they knew of Lafcadio Hearn’s translations of hokku (see D9b) and had themselves experimented with the form. By 1915 to 1917, Aiken recalled, he and Fletcher had ‘dived into Japanese and Chinese poetry and art’, and his autobiography (16) and published letters (19) demonstrate that the interest continued and grew deeper throughout his life. The effects of this on his work, however, are understated. While contemporaries were publishing experiments with hokku and romanticised verse ‘after the fashion’ of Japanese prints, Aiken was at work on a series of introspective book-length poems that only occasionally make use of Japanese subjects, and never as a central conceit. The study of his use of Japanese materials, then, more than for others of his time, must confront the degree to which techniques are derived from an understanding of Japanese models, and in this matter evidence for at least an indirect influence is clear. Miner notes the Impressionism of the early work and suggests a source in ukiyoe, a reasonable enough claim given Aiken’s love of the prints and the clear debt to ukiyoe of earlier literary Impressionism (see A25, pp. 66-96). Both Miner and Martin (21) note as well that despite misgivings Aiken borrowed extensively from the Imagists, and Miner cites examples of Pound’s hokku-derived technique super-position (see BK12) in much of his early work. Finally, evidence may be cited that Aiken’s techniques for unifying long poems owe something to Japanese models, at least as filtered through contemporary English sources (see especially 7 and 9). Taken together these demonstrate that while Aiken’s practice is never defined by Japanese techniques, neither is it unaffected by them. What we see are traces and shadows, but with enough substance to make Aiken an important part of this study. His influence has been such, furthermore, that if we find a general dissemination of techniques traceable to Japan in the poets of our own day, surely he, along with Pound, was for a time an important channel for their transmission, on both sides of the Atlantic. Poems discussed here, unless otherwise noted, are reprinted in Collected Poems (17).