BK. Ezra Pound

100. Miner, Earl. ‘Pound, Haiku, and the Image’. Hudson Review 9 (1956-57): 570-84.

In part incorporated into The Japanese Tradition (A25), but sufficiently independent to justify separate study. An important and carefully argued study of Pound’s introduction to and understanding of haiku and of its effects on his poetry and poetics. Haiku ‘made an important contribution to [Pound’s] theory and practice. It gave him material and examples for much of his theory concerning imagery, a programme or manifesto for poetry and art . . . and . . . a flexible technique which he called “the form of super-position”’ (see 12). Miner notes that Pound ‘was attracted by the suggestive, allusive, condensed, and concrete qualities of Japanese poetry’, and that these ‘confirmed what he was already thinking and advocating’. A number of studies about the relation between Pound’s poetics and haiku have followed this work and Miner’s treatment in Japanese Tradition, but none supersede either definition of the subject.