BD. Edmund Blunden

27. Near and Far. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1929.

Reprints A Quartet (23) and, in a section called ‘Japanese Garland’, The Visitor (26) and the poems that had appeared in the earlier limited edition Japanese Garland (18). Includes as well a ‘Prefatory Note’ in which Blunden writes that some of his ‘Japanese pieces’ have been ‘blamed’ for their ‘English tone’ and their author for being ‘an incorrigible “Briton”’ (see, for example, 172). He believes, however, that ‘those . . . who go from England to Japan without succumbing first to Japanesery’ will feel ‘no great gulf between the old experiences and the new’, for by ‘substitut[ing] cherry-blossom for rose, and rice for bread, and Alps for Chilterns—you do not thereby produce a mystical incomprehensibility’. This would be ‘better (and worse) provided’ by poets who avoid Japan altogether and focus on being ‘“Oriental”’. See also 173.