BD. Edmund Blunden

121. [Blunden]. ‘Poems of the New Japan’. Review of Bread Rather than Blossoms, by D. J. Enright (see CA14b). TLS, 22 June 1956, p. 378.

Enright’s work is ‘probably the most urgently written and the fullest collection of poems on Japanese subjects that has appeared from the pen of any writer’, Blunden writes, and even if it contained no ‘poetic beauties’ it ‘would yet be memorable as a record of the phenomena of the ancient Eastern nation after its unimagined cleavage’. Though Enright ‘does not spare the traditional writers of Japan, nor the scholars, nor even the dreamers of aesthetic dreams’, his work will be valued more for its ‘sympathy’ than for its ‘indignation’.