BC. Laurence Binyon and Japan

		Binyon is among the more important of the scholarly ‘sources of influence and transmission’ in this study, but he also was a poet of sophistication and skill, and among the more striking of his poems are those that have origins in his experience of Japan.

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century Laurence Binyon’s knowledge of Japanese art was unsurpassed in the West, and thereafter he was a major force in defining Western understanding of Japanese subjects. He provided textual and conceptual models for Aldington, Pound, Yeats, and many others (see especially BB3, BK140 and 148, and BL10, 25, 27a, and 54), and in this regard is among the more important of the scholarly ‘sources of influence and transmission’ in this study. He is as central to the shaping of images as Mitford (D4), Chamberlain (D5), Percival Lowell (D6), Fenollosa (D10), Aston (D13), Brinkley (D14), and Waley (D26). Binyon was a poet of considerable sophistication and skill, as well, however, and among the more striking of his poems are those that have origins in his experience of Japan. Perhaps the first point to note about Binyon’s verse mediation of Japan concerns what he did not write. In the early decades of the century his younger contemporaries often were occupied with poems derived from ukiyoe and understandings of Japanese poetry, but Binyon resisted this impulse. By 1931, when his two-volume Collected Poems appeared, he had authored four influential monographs on Japanese art (2, 6, 9, and 17), the entry on Japanese painting and prints for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (21), descriptive and interpretative catalogues of Japanese art in the British Museum (7, 11, 14, and 15), a collection of translations from classical Japanese poetry (20), and verse plays following Yeats’s experiments with the nô (16 and 22), but in twenty-four volumes of poems had derived neither technique nor accoutrement from Japanese sources. After his 1929 trip to Japan, however, Binyon published poems of the country that are among the earliest in English to respond reverentially and without condescension to experience of Japan (see especially 24). The conventional forms set these apart from the verse innovations of the time, but they remain among the most gracious and graceful of English poems of Japan, and at their best, as in the quiet and carefully-wrought verse of ‘Koya-san’ (24a), are among the most striking in the Binyon canon.