BE. Witter Bynner and Japan

	Bynner’s response to Japan marks a turning in American verse mediations of the country. The Japan poems are not among his most ambitious, but they are notable for their lowering of the rhetorical pitch that had been established in American poems of Japan from the beginning, by Whitman, Fenollosa, Ficke, Fletcher, Lowell, and others.

Of poets under study in this section B, Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke were the first to set foot in Japan and to record first-hand impressions of the country in print. On 15 March 1917 they departed Vancouver aboard R. M. S. Empress of Asia and arrived some two weeks later, preceding Blunden by seven years, Plomer by nine, Binyon by twelve, and Empson by fourteen. Bynner’s later encounters with China would prove more important to his work—he is best remembered for The Jade Mountain (1929), translations with Kiang Kang-hu from the poetry of the T’ang Dynasty—and he made no secret of preferring China to Japan (see 8, 14, 20b, and 20d), but his response to Japan, particularly in the poems of A Canticle of Pan (3, 1920), nonetheless marks a turning in American verse mediations of the country. The poems are not among Bynner’s most ambitious, but they are notable for their lowering of the rhetorical pitch that had been established in American poems of Japan from the beginning, in Whitman’s ‘Broadway Pageant’, Fenollosa’s ‘East and West’ (see CA1), Ficke’s ‘Song of East and West’ (BG2), Fletcher’s Japanese Prints (BH7), and Lowell’s Can Grande’s Castle and Pictures of the Floating World (see BI7 and 8), among others. Bynner’s evenness of tone, quiet identification with Buddhism, and suggestion of a link between East-Asian and Native American traditions anticipates poems of Japan published in the United States decades later, by Gary Snyder (see CA14e), Kenneth Rexroth (see CA13 and 14d), Lucien Stryk (CA14), and many others. Such was the historical landscape of Bynner’s day, however, that it took those decades, the war, and the Occupation for others to follow in his steps. In the aftermath of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, in no small part the result of the good will engendered by Blunden’s tenure at the Imperial University at Tokyo, British poets continued to travel to and to work in Japan in the twenties, thirties, and even into the forties, but Bynner and Ficke were the last American poets of note to visit the country from 1917 until after the Second World War.