BH. John Gould Fletcher and Japan

	One looking for the quintessential American idea of Japan as distilled from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American sources need look no further than Fletcher.

In the second decade of the century, as the ‘new poetry’ was being defined and put into practice, John Gould Fletcher like many of his contemporaries attempted to redefine the possibilities of verse in English by turning to foreign traditions for direction and tutelage, and more directly even than others who called themselves Imagists he found the nexus of his exploration in Japanese poetry, art, and religion. Even before his meeting with Pound in the summer of 1913 Fletcher had published a series of poems ‘from the Japanese’ (1) that were based upon a reading of Hearn (see D9) and French translations of Japanese verse, and after incorporating Pound’s principles of Imagism he produced a poetry that Miner (A25) has called ‘almost unbelievably’ indebted to Japan. The subjects and themes are Japanese, traceable at times to particular Japanese poems or prints, the Impressionistic detail is derived largely from ukiyoe, the poetics of super-position from hokku (see BK12), and the philosophical stance is grounded in an understanding of Zen Buddhism as filtered through Fenollosa (see especially D10c). A key word here, though, is ‘filter’. One looking for the quintessential Western idea of Japan as distilled from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American sources need look no further than Fletcher. His effort to charge English verse with energies derived from Japan was sincere, and his theoretical writing to this end remains provocative (see, especially, 4, 5, and 7a), but in the end the Japan to be found in his writing speaks more of the durability of a Western way of imagining than of a country in East Asia and its aesthetic tradition. The point could be made about several writers under study here, but apart from the popularity of his poems of Japan in their day Fletcher’s importance to the study derives as much from the extent to which he represents the dominant Western representation of Japan as from his frequent turning to ‘Japanese’ materials themselves. A fuller account than we have of the ways Japan has influenced English-language literature and thought must take into account the gap between representation and represented, and a look at Fletcher’s appropriation of Japan provides a point of departure as fitting as any.