SOURCE: "Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism," in Modern Philology, Vol. 90, No. 1, August, 1992, pp. 46-69.

It is commonplace to say that imagism played a crucial role in poetic modernism and that Ezra Pound, more than anyone else, put this poetics to practice in the 1910s. Yet imagism still remains a somewhat cloudy topic. Many discussions content themselves with restatements of Pound's celebrated essay on vorticism, published in September 1914.¹ Even Hugh Kenner, the most eminent critic of Pound, says, "The history of the Imagist Movement is a red herring." He admonishes one "to keep one's eyes on Pound's texts, and avoid generalities about Imagism."²

In that "Vorticism" essay, Pound acknowledged for the first time in his career his indebtedness to the spirit of Japanese poetry in general and the technique of hokku in particular. Among the Poundians, and there have been many in the East and in the West, who have tried to reconstruct the historical set of circumstances in which Pound moved, Earl Miner gives the best account of the profound influences Japanese poetry had upon the early Pound. It is Miner who offers the best annotated evidence that the sources for Pound's interest in Japanese poetics were partly provided by Pound's fellow imagists such as T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Richard Aldington.³

It is Miner as well who most frequently comments on the role Yone Noguchi played in the introduction and interpretation of Japanese poetry to an English audience during the early decades of the twentieth century.⁴ Noguchi was indeed a well-known bilingual Japanese and American poet, who by 1915 had published not only books of criticism widely read in England and America (The Spirit of Japanese Poetry and The Spirit of Japanese Art), but also several collections of his own English poems. By this date, moreover, his poems had been praised by Willa Cather, Joaquin Miller, and Gelett Burgess in America, by Bliss Carman in Canada, and by George Meredith, William Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, and others in England. What is surprising, therefore, is Miner's dismissive treatment of Noguchi's English writings as having had little to do with the imagist movement and with Pound in particular.

II

As Pound explained in his essay, the image is not a static, rational idea: "It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from this necessity came the name "vorticism' ("Vorticism," pp. 469-70). A year later Pound defined the form of an image by stating that the image "may be a sketch, a vignette, a criticism, an epigram or anything else you like. It may be impressionism, it may even be very good prose." An image, he argued, does not constitute simply a picture of something. As a vortex, the image must be "endowed with energy."⁵ Imagism, in turn, is likened to the painter's use of pigment. "The painter," Pound wrote, "should use his colour because he sees it or feels it. I don't much care whether he is representative or non-representative. .. . It is the same in writing poems, the author must use his image . . . not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics" ("Vorticism," p. 464).

To demonstrate his poetic theory, Pound thought of an image not as a decorative emblem or symbol but as a seed capable of germinating and developing into another organism. As an illustration he presented what he called "a hokku-like sentence" he had written:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.

"In a poem of this sort," he explained, "one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective" ("Vorticism," p. 467). The image of the faces in the crowd is based in immediate experience at a metro station in Paris; it was "a thing outward and objective." Not only did Pound actually see the "thing," but it generated such a sensation that he could not shake it out of his mind. This image, he emphasizes, "transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective," that is, the image of the "Petals, on a wet, black bough." Imagism is further contrasted to symbolism: "The symbolist's symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7. The imagiste's images have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and × in algebra" ("Vorticism," p. 463).

Although Pound's definition is clear enough, the sources for his ideas are hard to determine. Most discussions about the genesis of the imagist movement are speculative at best. Pound's insistence that an image in poetry must be active rather than passive suggests that a poem is not a description of something, but, as Aristotle had said of tragedy, an action. Pound approaches Aristotelianism in his insistence that the image of the faces in the crowd in his metro poem was not simply a description of his sensation at the station but an active entity capable of dynamic development. According to his experience, this particular image instantly transformed itself into another image, the image of the petals on a wet, black bough. To Pound the success of this poem resulted from his instantaneous perception of the relatedness between the two entirely different objects.

But Pound's note on the genesis of "In a Station of the Metro" in the "Vorticism" essay makes it clear that there was nothing instantaneous about the composition of this poem. It was in 1911 that Pound, having seen those "beautiful faces" at La Concorde, wrote a thirty-line poem "and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity' ("Vorticism," p. 467). Six months later he reduced the longer text to a poem half the length, and still a year later he wrote the final version, a two-line poem. Pound's insistence on the instantaneous perception of the metro images drove him to repeated attempts at recreating the instantaneous images he had perceived a year-and-a-half earlier. Traditionally, the principles of instantaneity and spontaneity are as fundamental for the composition of hokku as when applied to Zen-inspired painting and calligraphy. In any event, his discovery of hokku in 1913-14 was, as he says, "useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion" ("Vorticism," p. 467). To Pound, the most important thing he learned about hokku was "this particular sort of consciousness," which he was unable to identify with any version of impressionist art.⁶

Another equally important tenet of imagism calls for directness in expression. The immediate model for this principle was nineteenth-century French prose. Pound did not mention specific English poets but seemed adamantly opposed to Victorian poetry, which he characterized as wordy and rhetorical. Instead he urged his fellow poets "to bring poetry up to the level of prose." "Flaubert and De Maupassant," he believed, "lifted prose to the rank of a finer art, and one has no patience with contemporary poets who escape from all the difficulties of the infinitely difficult art of good prose by pouring themselves into loose verses" ("Vorticism," p. 462).

If Pound's ideal poetry has the directness and clarity of good prose as opposed to the suggestiveness and vagueness of symbolist poetry, then his sources certainly did not include W. B. Yeats. Even though Yeats dedicated the noh play At the Hawk's Well to Pound, Yeats was not enthusiastic about Pound's poetics. "My own theory of poetical or legendary drama," Yeats wrote to Fiona Macleod, "is that it should have no realistic, or elaborate, but only a symbolic and decorative setting. A forest, for instance, should be represented by a forest pattern and not by a forest painting."⁷ The difference between Pound and Yeats reveals itself in the two poets' differing views of the Japanese noh play. A symbolist and spiritualist poet, Yeats was fascinated by the noh play. By contrast, Pound was interested not in particular images and symbols but in the unifying effect a noh play produces on the stage.

This disagreement between Pound and Yeats over whether poetic images should be suggestive or active also involves what Noguchi, a poet and critic well acquainted with both poets, felt compelled to write in "What Is a Hokku Poem?" published in London.⁸ In that essay, Noguchi first defined hokku as an expression of Japanese poets' "understanding of Nature" or, better put, as a song or chant of "their longing or wonder or adoration toward Mother Nature" that is "never mystified by any cloud or mist like Truth or Beauty of Keats' understanding." Noguchi differentiated between the "suggestive" and subjective coloration of English poetry and the Japanese hokku, "distinctly clear-cut like a diamond or star." "I say," he argued, "that the star itself has almost no share in the creation of a condition even when your dream or vision is gained through its beauty. . . . I value the "hokku' poem, at least some of them, because of its own truth and humanity simple and plain." Noguchi then analyzed the aim of hokku: the hokku poet expresses the spirit of nature rather than the will of man or woman. Noguchi would agree that hokku is "suggestive" only if the word 'suggestive' means that "truth and humanity are suggestive." He added, "But I can say myself as a poet . . . that your poem would certainly end in artificiality if you start out to be suggestive from the beginning."⁹

Finally, Noguchi based his definition and analysis of aim in Zen philosophy, understood as discipline of the mind: one should not allow one's individuality to control action. Zen does not, indeed, recognize human reality, the existence of good and evil, because this reality is but the creation of man's will rather than the spirit of nature. Noguchi thus observed that "there is no word in so common use by Western critics as suggestive, which makes more mischief than enlightenment." Although Western critics "mean it quite simply . . . to be a new force of salvation, . . . I say that no critic is necessary for this world of poetry."¹⁰

By 1918 Pound's vorticist theory had extended to his discussion of Chinese characters. As the correspondence between Pound and Mary Fenollosa, widow of Ernest Fenollosa, indicates, Pound began to receive Fenollosa's manuscripts as early as 1913." Fenollosa's essay "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry," posthumously published by Pound in The Little Review in 1918, attempted to show that Chinese characters, which Pound called ideograms, derive from visual rather than aural experiences. A Chinese character, Fenollosa noted, signifies an observable action instead of an abstract notion. Unlike a Western word, a phonetic sign, it denotes a concrete, natural phenomenon. The Chinese character, Fenollosa wrote, "is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion."¹²

Pound's attempt to verify Fenollosa's theory involved not only his contemporaries, poets and critics living in London in the 1910s, but his own effort to search for ideas in other sources. One of these sources was the Japanese noh play, in which Pound became interested through Fenollosa's notes. It is generally understood that Pound's interest in Japanese poetry, especially hokku, grew partly through his acquaintance with Fenollosa's writings. None of Fenollosa's writings, however, directly concerns Japanese poetry, let alone hokku. Having lived many years in Japan as an art critic, Fenollosa became well versed in Japanese art and literature, but his actual knowledge of the Japanese language was not profound.¹³ It is, therefore, inconceivable that Pound became well acquainted with hokku through Fenollosa. It is also unlikely that English contemporaries such as T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint, who are said to have introduced hokku to Pound, served his purpose. Pound would not have been able to learn from them the subtle elements of Japanese poetry because they had no firsthand knowledge of the Japanese language.¹⁴

III

Pound's most likely source of information was Noguchi. He first corresponded with Pound and then met Pound, along with Yeats, when he gave a series of lectures on Japanese poetry in England in early 1914. The relationship between Pound and Noguchi began in 1911, when Noguchi sent his fifth collection of English poems, The Pilgrimage (1908 and 1909) in two volumes, to Pound with a note: "As I am not yet acquainted with your work, I wish you [would] send your books or books which you like to have me read. This little note may sound quite businesslike, but I can promise you that I can do better in my next letter to you." Noguchi also wrote as a postscript: "I am anxious to read not only your poetical work but also your criticism."¹⁵ Pound acknowledged receipt of the books and note in a letter postmarked September 2, 1911.

c/o Elkin Mathews

Vigo St. London.

Dear Yone Noguchi:

1 want to thank you very much for your lovely books & for your kindness in sending them to me.

I had, of course, known of you, but I am much occupied with my mediaeval studies & had neglected to read your books altho' they lie with my own in Mathews Shop & I am very familiar with the appearance of their covers.

I am reading those you sent me but I do not yet know what to say of them except that they have delighted me. Besides it is very hard to write to you until I know more about you, you are older than I am I gather from the dates of the poems you have been to New York. You are giving us the spirit of Japan, is it not? very much as I am trying to deliver from obscurity certain forgotten odours of Provence & Tuscany (my works on Guido Cavalcanti, & Arnaut Daniel, are, the one in press, the other ready to be printed.)

I have sent you two volumes of poems. I do not know whether to send you "The Spirit of Romance" or not: It treats of mediaeval poetry in southern Europe but has many flaws of workmanship. . . .

Of your country I know almost nothing surely if the east & the west are ever to understand each other that understanding must come slowly & come first through the arts.

You ask about my "criticism". There is some criticism in the "Spirit of Romance" & there will be some in the prefaces to the "Guido" & the "Arnaut". But I might be more to the point if we who are artists should discuss the matters of technique & motive between ourselves. Also if you should write about these matters I would discuss your letters with Mr. Yeats & likewise my answers. . . .

Yours very sincerely

Ezra Pound¹⁶

Although Noguchi did not write again as Pound had suggested, Noguchi published his essay "What Is a Hokku Poem?" in London in January 1913, as noted earlier. In the meantime three books of criticism by Noguchi appeared during this period: The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (London, 1914; cited hereafter in the text), Through the Torii (London, 1914), and The Spirit of Japanese Art (London, 1915). Noguchi was also invited to contribute "The Everlasting Sorrow: A Japanese Noh Play" in 1917 and an article, "The Japanese Noh Play," in 1918 to The Egoist.¹¹ Pound's encouragement was perhaps responsible for the publication of some of Noguchi's own hokku poems in The Egoist and in Poetry.¹⁸

Because his essays and lectures during this period also dealt with Japanese art, Yeats, who was interested in Japanese painting and the noh play, became interested in Noguchi's work as well.¹⁹ As Pound's and Yeats's letters to Noguchi indicate, Pound and Yeats not only were close associates themselves but also were both well acquainted with Noguchi. Despite the active dialogues that occurred between Pound and Noguchi, critics have not seriously considered their relationship. The only critic who has mentioned Noguchi in discussing the imagist movement regarded him not as a poet and critic from whose ideas Pound might have benefited but as one of the poets whom Pound himself influenced.²⁰ Such a preposterous connection is undermined by the simple fact that most of Noguchi's English poems, as Pound noted in his letter to Noguchi, had been published in America and England long before the early 1910s, when Pound and his fellow poets began to discuss imagism among themselves. It is more accurate historically to say that Noguchi influenced Pound rather than the other way around.

Pound had apparently known little about Japanese poetry before he attended the April 1909 meeting of the Poets' Club. This group, headed by T. E. Hulme, was succeeded by another group called "Les Imagistes," or "Des Imagistes," which Pound led from 1912 to 1914.²¹ Although Pound in fact joined the Poets' Club, its sessions did not prove of much inspiration to him. Richard Aldington, who joined in 1911, was more interested in the color prints of Utamaro, Hokusai, and others found in the British Museum than in Japanese poetry.²² The fact that Pound was more seriously interested than Aldington was in Japanese poetry is indicated by Aldington's parody of Pound's metro poem that appeared in the January 1915 issue of The Egoist.²³ Allen Upward, another member of "Les Imagistes" whom Pound had met in 1911, had some importance for Pound because Upward used the term "whirl-swirl" in his book The New Word (New York, 1908). Upward, a self-styled intellectual and a poet, had "a powerful and original mind clearly and trenchantly concerned with matters that bear directly on what Pound meant by "vortex.'²⁴ But Upward, who was well read in Confucius and perhaps familiar with Chinese poetry, did not have sufficient knowledge of Japanese poetry, let alone of hokku, to influence Pound.²⁵

The degree of Pound's initial interest in hokku, therefore, was not entirely clear, for he was much occupied with Provençal poetry and criticism, as his letter to Noguchi indicates. It is quite possible that Pound learned about hokku from T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint, who were experimenting with hokku and tanka, the thirty-one-syllable Japanese poetic form.²⁶ The difficulty with this assumption, however, is that Hulme and Flint studied hokku through French translators and critics who used the terms "haiku' and "haikai ', more modern words, rather than "hokku'. Most strikingly, neither Pound nor Noguchi referred to the Japanese poem as "haiku' or "haikai'; both consistently called it "hokku' in their writings.

However coincidental this might have been, there are two more pieces of evidence suggesting that Pound might have learned about hokku in Noguchi's work. First, as I have already observed, the essay "What Is a Hokku Poem?" in which Noguchi declared that poetic images must be active instead of suggestive, direct instead of symbolic, and that the aim of a hokku is to understand the spirit of nature rather than to express the will of man was published in Rhythm (London) in January 1913, almost two years before Pound's essay "Vorticism." Even Pound's essay "A Few Don'ts," the earliest manifesto on imagism, appeared in the March 1913 issue of Poetry (Chicago) two months after Noguchi's essay. Second, Noguchi's book of criticism, The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, was published in London by John Murray in March 1914, half a year before Pound's "Vorticism" essay.²⁷

Moreover, the key chapter of Noguchi's book, entitled "The Japanese Hokku Poetry," was a lecture delivered in the Hall of Magdalen College, Oxford, on January 28, 1914, at the invitation of Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, and T. H. Warren, president of the college and professor of poetry in the university. The first chapter, "Japanese Poetry," was also based on a lecture Noguchi gave at the Japan Society of London on January 14. The rest of the book had been presented as other lectures to such audiences as the Royal Asiatic Society and the Quest Society in England before April 1914, when Noguchi left London for Tokyo by way of Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. It is altogether possible that Pound heard Noguchi lecture at the Quest Society since Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. E. Hulme all lectured there in 1914.²⁸ During this stay in England, Through the Torii, another collection of essays that included a variety of commentary on William Rossetti, James Whistler, W. B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde, and his autobiography, The Story of Yone Noguchi Told by Himself, also appeared in print.

Interestingly enough, Pound's "Vorticism" essay quoted a famous hokku by Moritake (1452-1540) just before discussing the often-quoted metro poem:

The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:
A butterfly.

["Vorticism," p. 467]

This hokku in Japanese has three lines:

Rak-ka eda ni
Kaeru to mireba
Kocho-o kana

Noguchi translated this poem in three lines:

I thought I saw the fallen leaves
Returning to their branches:
Alas, butterflies were they.

[Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 50]

Pound must have reconstructed the hokku in two lines simply because he had in mind "a form of super-position" in which his metro poem was to be composed. The similarities between Pound's and Noguchi's versions of the poem in question do not seem coincidental, because the superpository division is indicated by a colon in both constructions. Both translations have identical key words: "fallen," "branch," and "butterfly." The only difference in diction is between Pound's "blossom" (ka in Japanese) and Noguchi's "leaves." In syntax, however, these translations are different: Noguchi's version is subjective from the start and ends objectively; the reverse is true in Pound's rendering. Syntactically, Noguchi's version is closer to the Japanese original than Pound's. A literal translation of Moritake's first two lines, "Rak-ka eda ni / Kaeru to mireba," would read: "The fallen blossom appears to come back to its branch."

What appealed to Pound was the terseness and intensity of imagery in a hokku. Irked by the decorative and superfluous style of much Victorian poetry, he urged his fellow poets to eliminate words that do not contribute to the central meaning of the poem. "All poetic language," Pound insisted, "is the language of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments" ("Vorticism," p. 466). By saying, "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree," he meant to elaborate the imagist principle that using fewer words maximizes and intensifies meaning.²⁹ In "What Is a Hokku Poem?" Noguchi wrote, "I always thought that the most beautiful flowers grow close to the ground, and they need no hundred petals for expressing their own beauty; how can you call it real poetry if you cannot tell it by a few words?"³⁰

Pound, furthermore, applied the principle of terseness and intensity to the construction of a single image in his poetry. "The "one image poem,' Pound noted, "is a form of super-position, that is to say it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion" ("Vorticism," p. 467). Noguchi pointed out the same technique: "Hokku means literally a single utterance or the utterance of a single verse; that utterance should be like a "moth light playing on reality's dusk,' or "an art hung, as a web, in the air of perfume,' swinging soft in music of a moment" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 39). To illustrate his point, Noguchi quoted a hokku by Buson:

The night of the Spring,
Oh, between the eve
And the dawn.

This hokku was placed against the opening passage of Makura Zoshi (Pillow Sketches) by Sei Shonagon, a celebrated prose writer in medieval Japan: "I love to watch the dawn grow gradually white and whiter, till a faint rosy tinge crowns the mountain's crest, while slender streaks of purple cloud extend themselves above." Noguchi considered Buson's image far more vivid and intensive than Sei Shonagon's, remarking, "Buson is pleased to introduce the night of the Spring which should be beautiful without questioning, since it lies between those two beautiful things, the eve and the dawn" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, pp. 48-49).

IV

Not only was Noguchi an interpreter of hokku poems for the English reader, but he tried his hand at writing hokku poems in English as well. He later collected them in the volume Japanese Hokkus (Boston, 1920), which he dedicated to Yeats.³¹ One of Noguchi's earliest hokku is reminiscent of Buson's, quoted above:

Tell me the street to Heaven.
This? Or that? Oh, which?
What webs of streets!

He wrote this hokku in England, he says, "when I most abruptly awoke in 1902 to the noise of Charing Cross. . . . And it was by West-minster Bridge where I heard the evening chime that I wrote again in "hokku' which appears, when translated, as follows":

Is it, Oh, list:
The great voice of Judgment Day?
So runs Thames and my Life.³²

Noguchi wrote many such hokku-like poems in imitation of the Japanese hokku, as did Pound. The superpository technique, which Pound said he had discovered in Japanese hokku, resembles that of Noguchi. For instance, Pound's "Alba," typical of his many hokku-like poems, reads:

As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.³³

Most of Noguchi's hokku, as the two poems quoted above show, do have a form of superposition. Like Pound's, Noguchi's hokku constitutes one image poem which has two separate ideas set on top of one another. In the first poem by Noguchi, an idea of "the street to Heaven" is set on top of an idea of "webs," despite a close similarity between the two images. In the second, an idea of the flow of the Thames is set on top of an idea of the course of "my Life."

But there are some differences between Noguchi's and Pound's hokku. Noguchi does not as closely adhere to the well-established Japanese syllabic measure of five or seven as does Pound. Noguchi's two hokku above have 7-5-4 and 4-7-6 measures; Pound's "Alba," "Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord," and "Ts'ai Chi'h" have those of 7-7-8, 7-5-7, and 8-7-7, respectively. If the first line of Pound's metro poem had been reconstructed as two lines, the poem would have had a measure of 5-7-7 (The apparition / Of these faces in the crowd: / Petals, on a wet, black bough) much like a Japanese hokku. Noguchi, moreover, tends to ignore the long-established poetic tradition in which a Japanese hokku has an explicit reference to a season. Pound, on the other hand, consciously adheres to this tradition as seen in many of his hokku-like poems and somewhat longer pieces such as "Heather" and "Society."³⁴

What a Japanese hokku and Pound's image share besides their brevity and intensity is the poet's ability to escape the confinement of the poem. The sense of liberation in hokku is usually accomplished through references to time and space. A Japanese hokku contains not only a reference to a season, an indication of time, but also an image of nature, that of space. Pound's hokku-like poems, such as "In a Station of the Metro" and "Alba," indeed have references to time and space. Pound called the metro emotion, which came from the image of the faces in the crowd, "a thing outward and objective" and the image of the "petals, on a wet, black bough" "a thing inward and subjective." The image of the petals, nevertheless, is a natural object in contrast to that of the faces in the crowded station, a human object.

In Pound's mind in the realm of subjective perception the image of the faces, an objective image, transforms into the image of the petals, a subjective image. This perception also means that the image of the faces, an image of man, transforms into that of the petals, an image of nature. The shifting of objective and subjective images in Pound's poem is depicted in terms of a vortex, in which an image is not only active in itself but capable of merging into another image that appears in its wake. Because Pound's image has this tendency, it is often as difficult to separate the mental vision from the external as it is to separate mind from matter, the perceiver from the perceived, in Japanese hokku.

In The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, Noguchi is as critical as Pound of the Western poet's tendency to wordiness. Noguchi's emphasis on the Japanese hokku as "the real poetry of action" entails that a hokku aim to narrow the distance between man and nature, the perceiver and the perceived. The narrower the distance, the better the hokku becomes. Based upon "Lao Tze's canon of spiritual anarchism" and Zen's principle of controlling the mind, Noguchi declares:

To attach too closely to the subject matter in literary expression is never a way to complete the real saturation; the real infinite significance will only be accomplished at such a consummate moment when the end and means are least noticeable, and the subject and expression never fluctuate from each other, being in perfect collocation; it is the partial loss of the birthright of each that gains an artistic triumph. . . . I do never mean that the Hokku poems are lyrical poetry in the general Western understanding; but the Japanese mind gets the effect before perceiving the fact of their brevity, its sensibility resounding to their single note, as if the calm bosom of river water to the song of a bird. [Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 34]

To illustrate what he calls "the sense of mystical affinity between the life of Nature and the life of man, between the beauty of flowers and the beauty of love," he quotes his own poem:

It's accident to exist as a flower or a poet;
A mere twist of evolution but from the same force:
I see no form in them but only beauty in evidence;
It's the single touch of their imagination to get the
embodiment of a poet or a flower:
To be a poet is to be a flower,
To be the dancer is to make the singer sing.

[Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 37]

Pound, on the other hand, views the affinity between man and nature differently. What Pound calls "a thing inward and subjective" does not necessarily correspond to a vision of man; nor is "a thing outward and objective" the same thing as a vision of nature.

To explain the transformation of images between man and nature, the perceiver and the perceived, in Japanese hokku, Noguchi quoted Basho's "The Old Pond," perhaps the most celebrated hokku ever written:

The old pond!
A frog leapt into
List, the water sound!

One may think a frog an absurd poetic subject, but Basho focused his vision on a scene of autumnal desolation, an image of nature. The pond was perhaps situated on the premises of an ancient temple whose silence was suddenly broken by a frog plunging into the deep water. As Noguchi conceived the experience, Basho, a Zen Buddhist, was "supposed to awaken into enlightenment now when he heard the voice bursting out of voicelessness, and the conception that life and death were mere change of condition was deepened into faith" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, pp. 45-46). Basho was not suggesting that the tranquility of the pond meant death or that the frog symbolized life. Just as Pound had the sensation of seeing the beautiful faces in the metro station, Basho here had the sensation of hearing the sound bursting out of soundlessness. A hokku is not a representation of goodness, truth, or beauty; there is nothing particularly good, true, or beautiful about a frog's jumping into the water.

It seems as though Basho, in writing the poem, carried nature within him and brought himself to the deepest level of nature where all sounds lapse into the world of silence and infinity. Though his vision is based upon reality, it transcends time and space. What a Zen poet like Basho is showing is that man can do enough naturally, enjoy doing it, and achieve his peace of mind. This fusion of man and nature is called spontaneity in Zen. The best hokku poems, because of their linguistic limitations, are inwardly extensive and outwardly infinite. A severe constraint imposed on one aspect of hokku must be balanced by a spontaneous, boundless freedom on the other.

From a Zen point of view, such a vision is devoid of thought and emotion. Since Zen is the most important philosophical tradition influencing Japanese hokku, the hokku poet aims at understanding the spirit of nature. Basho thus recognizes little division between man and nature, the subjective and the objective; he is never concerned with the problems of good and evil. Placed against this tradition, Pound's poetics in its philosophical aspect considerably differs from Basho's. Pound cannot be called a Zen poet because he declared: "An "Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."³⁵ A Zen poet seeks satori, an enlightenment that transcends time and place, and even the consciousness of self. This enlightenment is defined as a state of mu, nothingness, which is absolutely free of any thought or emotion; it is so completely free that such a state corresponds to that of nature. For a Zen-inspired poet, nature is a mirror of the enlightened self; one must see and hear things as they really are by making one's consciousness pure and clear. Pound seems to be able to appreciate this state of mind, but obviously he does not necessarily try to seek it in his own work.

In fact, Japanese hokku seldom take physical love, war, beasts, earthquakes, floods, and the like for their subjects. And while Pound's poetry does express good and evil, love and hatred, individual feeling and collective myth, Basho's shuns such sentiments and emotions altogether. Pound and a Zen poet, however, do agree that their poetic vision is spontaneous and capable of attaining enlightenment. Pound maintained, "It is the presentation of such a "complex' instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art."³⁶ Pound's observation, however, is very much a Western formulation of an experience familiar to Zeninspired artists.

This sense of liberation suggests an impersonal conception of poetry, for it focuses attention not upon the poet but upon the image. T. S. Eliot, whom most observers agree Pound influenced, held the same view.³⁷ Japanese poets such as Basho and Buson held the same principle. Their poetry seldom dealt with dreams, fantasies, or concepts of heaven and hell; it was strictly concerned with the portrayal of nature mountains, trees, birds, waterfalls, nights, days, seasons. For the Japanese hokku poet, nature is a mirror of the enlightened self; the poet must see and hear things as they really are by making his or her consciousness pure, natural, and unemotional. "Japanese poets," Noguchi wrote, "go to Nature to make life more meaningful, sing of flowers and birds to make humanity more intensive" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, p. 37).

As opposed to his later poetry, Pound's early poetry, and his hokku-like poems in particular, have little to do with his personal emotion or thought. In such poetry, Pound is not really concerned with thought and emotion. If Pound's hokku sounded intellectual or emotional, it did so only to an English reader who was still Arnoldian in his or her taste and unfamiliar with the imagist movement of the 1910s, not to mention with "the spirit of Japanese poetry" Noguchi tried to introduce to the English audience. Japanese poetry shuns symbols and metaphors because figurative language might lessen the intensity and spontaneity of a newly experienced sensation. Such expressions would not only undermine originality in the poet's sensibility but resort to intellectualization as well as what Noguchi, perhaps echoing Matthew Arnold, called "a criticism of life," which traditionally Japanese poetry was not.³⁸

The hokku poet may not only aim at expressing sensation but also at generalizing and hence depersonalizing it. This characteristic can be shown even by one of Basho's lesser-known hokku:

How cool it is,
Putting the feet on the wall:
An afternoon nap.³⁹

Basho was interested in expressing how his feet, anyone's feet, would feel when placed on a wall inside a house on a warm summer afternoon. His subject was none other than this direct sensation. He did not want to convey any emotion, any thought, any beauty; there remained only poetry, only nature.

In "Alba" what Pound expressed was not the personal feeling he had about the woman lying beside him at dawn but his spontaneous sensation of the coolness of "the pale wet leaves / of lily-of-the-valley." Likewise, the sensation of slowly cooling hot water was Pound's subject in "The Bath Tub," as the title suggests, rather than his feelings about the woman.⁴⁰ The image of a "fan of white silk, / clear as frost on the grass-blade" is central in "Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord," where a minimal image of the lord's concubine is evoked by a one-word reference to her: "You also are laid aside."⁴¹ Such subtleties could not have been learned from Pound's fellow imagists like Flint and Aldington, who remained labored, superficial imitators of Japanese hokku. Pound and Noguchi, by contrast, showed themselves far more capable of understanding the spirit of Japanese poetry.

V

As partly suggested in the remarks on superposition quoted above, the hokku also provided a structural model for Pound's version of imagism. Acknowledging that the Japanese had evolved this short form of poetry, Pound seized upon the unique form of "super-position" which, he observed, constitutes a hokku. To him, the hokku often consists of two disparate images in juxtaposition, and yet it appears as a single image. Lacking the copula "is' or the preposition "like ', the image cannot be metaphoric or analogical. As Pound's account of the composition of the metro poem shows, he had no intention of likening the image of the beautiful faces in the crowd to the image of petals on a wet, black bough or of making one image suggestive or representative of the other.⁴² If one image is used to suggest another or to represent another, both images would be weakened. But if one image is used to generate or intensify another, and the other image, in turn, intensifies the first one, then the whole poem as one image would be intensified.

The key to the superpository structure of Pound's image is a coalescence of two unlike images. Such an image must be generated "in an instant of time," as Pound cautions in his essay "A Few Don'ts."⁴³ Creating such an image needs no preparations, no explanations, no qualifications; Pound calls "the "natural course of events' the exalted moment, the vision unsought or at least the vision gained without machination."⁴⁴ In The Spirit of Japanese Poetry and The Spirit of Romance Noguchi and Pound respectively emphasized this revelatory moment when high poetry must be written. But such a parallel in their poetics does not necessitate that one's ideas came from the other's. Pound's observations might have been made independently.

It is quite possible that Pound became acquainted through other sources with many of the superpository hokku which Noguchi cited as examples in The Spirit of Japanese Poetry. In addition to Moritake's "I Thought I Saw the Fallen Leaves" and Basho's "The Old Pond," quoted earlier, Noguchi translated the following in The Spirit of Japanese Poetry: Buson's "Oh, How Cool " (p. 47) and "Prince Young, Gallant" (p. 36), Basho's "Lying 111 on Journey" (p. 38), and Hokushi's "It Has Burned Down" (p. 27). It may be significant, however, that in another collection of critical essays Noguchi cited several of his own numerous hokku in English along with those by ancient masters. Many of Noguchi's English hokku, moreover, had been published in The Pilgrimage (1908, 1909). Pound might have acquainted himself with Noguchi's published hokku before he experimented with his version.

As Pound would account for the circumstances of his metro poem in Paris in 1912, Noguchi also narrated the experience he had had in London in 1903:

I myself was a hokku student since I was fifteen or sixteen years old; during many years of my Western life, now amid the California forest, then by the skyscrapers of New York, again in the London "bus, I often tried to translate the hokku of our old masters but I gave up my hope when I had written the following in English:

My Love's lengthened hair Swings o'er me from Heaven's gate: Lo, Evening's shadow!

It was in London, to say more particularly, Hyde Park, that I wrote the above hokku in English, where I walked slowly, my mind being filled with the thought of the long hair of Rossetti's woman as I perhaps had visited Tate's Gallery that afternoon. .. . I exclaimed then: "What use to try the impossibility in translation, when I have a moment to feel a hokku feeling and write about it in English?"⁴⁵

Structurally, Pound's metro poem resembles Noguchi's Hyde Park hokku. As in Pound's poem where the outward image of the faces in the crowd is set on top of the inward image of petals on a wet, black bough, so the actual vision of an evening shadow in Noguchi's poem is juxtaposed to an envisioning of a woman's long hair. In each poem a pair of images, similar in form but different in content, coalesces into another autonomous image, which generates different meaning. The superposition of the paired images transforms into a different image in form and content, what Pound calls "the "one image' poem" ("Vorticism," p. 467). This transformation of images retains the sensation of each separate object perceived, but it also conveys a greater sensation by uniting the two experiences.⁴⁶ For both poets, such a transformation is optimal, for they believe that images in poetry cannot and should not be divided as external and internal, physical and mental, objective and subjective.⁴⁷

To illustrate the energy latent in this transformation of images, Pound provided an anecdote: "I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch and say, "Mamma, can I open the light?' She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art" ("Vorticism," p. 466). Although he later became interested in Fenollsa's explanation that written Chinese characters denote action, he was first attracted to the poetics of the hokku, what he called "the sense of exploration .. . the beauty of this sort of knowing" ("Vorticism," pp. 466-67). Noguchi expounded this poetics in terms of an intensive art by referring to Kikaku's celebrated hokku:

Autumn's full moon:
Lo, the shadows of a pine-tree
Upon the mats!

The beauty of the harvest moon is not only humanized but intensified by the shadow of a tree Kikaku saw on the tatami mats. "Really," Noguchi wrote, "it was my first opportunity to observe the full beauty of the light and shadow, more the beauty of the shadow in fact, far more luminous than the light itself, with such a decorativeness, particularly when it stamped the dustless mats as a dragon-shaped ageless pine-tree."⁴⁸ The situation here, shared by Pound and Noguchi, is one of finding, discovering, and hence of inventing the new.

As if to bear out Pound's vorticist thinking in poetry, Noguchi made a modest proposal for English poets. "I think," he wrote, "it is time for them to live more of the passive side of Life and Nature, so as to make the meaning of the whole of them perfect and clear, to value the beauty of inaction so as to emphasise action, to think of Death so as to make Life more attractive." To the Japanese mind, an intensive art can be created not from action but from inaction. Noguchi thus argued that the larger part of life "is builded upon the unreality by the strength of which the reality becomes intensified; when we sing of the beauty of night, that is to glorify, through the attitude of reverse, in the way of silence, the vigour and wonder of the day" (Spirit of Japanese Poetry, pp. 24-25). Noguchi's paradox was echoed in Pound's statement about vorticism. To Pound, an intensive art is not an emphatic art. By an intensive art, Pound meant "one . . . concerned with the relative intensity, or relative significance, of different sorts of expression. . . . They are more dynamic. I do not mean they are more emphatic, or that they are yelled louder" ("Vorticism," p. 468).

Pound illustrated this intensive art with a hokku-like sentence in his essay "Affirmations," first published in the New Age in 1915:

The pine-tree in mist upon the far hill looks like a fragment of Japanese armour.

The images appear in simile form, but Pound has no intention of intensifying the beauty of either image by comparison to the other. "In either case," he points out, "the beauty, in so far as it is beauty of form, is the result of "planes in relation.' . . . The tree and the armour are beautiful because their diverse planes overlie in a certain manner." Unlike the sculptor or the painter, the poet, who must use words to intensify his art, Pound says, "may cast on the reader's mind a more vivid image of either the armour or the pine by mentioning them close together . . . for the works not with planes or with colours but with the names of objects and of properties. It is his business so to use, so to arrange, these names as to cast a more definite image than the layman can cast."⁴⁹

Critics have shown over the years that Pound's idea of vorticism underlies not only his short imagistic poems but also his longer pieces such as the Cantos, Cathay, and his translations of noh plays. Noguchi, on the other hand, attempted to intensify an image in a poem longer than the hokku by endowing it with action and autonomy. "The Passing of Summer" (1909), for instance, reads:

An empty cup whence the light of passion is drunk!
To-day a sad rumour passes through the trees,
A chill wind is borne by the stream,
The waves shiver in pain;
Where now the cicada's song long and hot?⁵⁰

Such visual images as an empty cup, the chilly wind blowing over the stream, and the shivering waves do not simply denote the passing of summer; they constitute its action. Similarly, experiences or memories of experiences like drinking "the light of passion" and hearing "the cicada's song long and hot" do not merely express the poet's nostalgia or sentiment about the summer; these images, rather than being metonymies, recreate the actions of the summer.⁵¹ In Noguchi's poetry, as in the hokku, poetry and sensation are spontaneously conjoined and intensified, to leave no room for rationalism or moralism.

VI

Numerous parallels between Pound's poetics and Noguchi's do not entail the conclusion that both poets held the same principles throughout their respective careers. Much of Noguchi's art and literary criticism shows great enthusiasm at times for Yeats's mysticism and Whitman's transcendentalism.⁵² Noguchi had a taste for certain styles of poetry that Pound obviously did not. But their writings as a whole suggest that both writers, as poets and critics, agreed on the ideas of imagism during the period between 1908 when The Pilgrimage, Noguchi's fifth collection of English poems, appeared in Tokyo and London and 1914, when Noguchi's The Spirit of Japanese Poetry was published in London. For Noguchi, this period came in the middle of his career as it coincided with Pound's early career and interest in imagism. This agreement on imagism constituted an interpenetrating relationship of Japanese poetics and Western intentions in early modernism. Pound's launching of "Imagism" in London in 1912 and 1913 with (he support of T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, H. D., Richard Aldington, and others has become a legend of sorts. And much of the imagist work by various hands began to appear in Chicago in Poetry and in London in Des Imagistes and The Freewoman (later The Egoist.) But the sources that Noguchi brought to Western attention as early as 1903, when From the Eastern Sea, the third collection of his English poems, was published in London, have become not only obscure but neglected.

In March 1913 Pound and his associates collectively drew up and published the three principles of their "faith." The first was "direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective." Noguchi would wholeheartedly have endorsed the formulation. The second principle called for using "absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation," and Noguchi had documented the practice of this tenet in the hokku by Japanese masters as well as in his own work. The third principle was "to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome" ("Vorticism," p. 462). Because the Japanese language radically differs from a Western language in rhythm, rhyme, stress, or tone, Noguchi would readily have assented to the proposal.

Much of Pound's early work and Noguchi's clearly reflects this accord between the imagists and Noguchi. It is true that while Pound was fascinated by Japanese poetics, he was also interested in vorticism as applied to visual arts, as his commentary on such artists as Gaudier-Brzeska, Brancusi, and Picasso indicates. Through the Poets' Club, Pound was also closely associated with Hulme, Flint, Aldington, Upward, and others, some of whom were initially attracted to Japanese color prints by such painters as Utamaro and Hokusai exhibited in the British Museum. There is clear evidence that Pound's associates also tried their hand at hokku with various degrees of seriousness and success. By the mid 1910s, imagism had indeed become the literary Zeitgeist, and any poet living in London would have received some influence from the Japanese sources.

To sum up, then, Noguchi's English poems had been widely circulated in London well before September 1914, when Pound's "Vorticism" essay appeared, and Noguchi's essay on hokku in Rhythm and his book The Spirit of Japanese Poetry were published in January 1913 and March 1914, respectively. The material in the essay and the book was delivered as a series of lectures during his stay in England from December 1913 to April 1914. In these circumstances, it is hardly conceivable that the imagists did not acquaint themselves with Noguchi's ideas. Even though Pound's modernist theory might partly have derived from other sources, one can scarcely overlook the direct link between Japanese poetics and Pound's imagism through Noguchi.

NOTES

¹ Ezra Pound, "Vorticism," Fortnightly Review, n.s., no. 573 (September 1, 1914): 461-71; hereafter cited as "Vorticism."

² Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Millwood, N.Y., 1947), p. 58.

³ Earl Miner, "Pound, Haiku and the Image," Hudson Review 9 (Winter 1957): 570-84, and The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1958). There is some ambiguity in Miner's chronology since, in his article, the date of Pound's joining the Poets' Club is said to be "just before the first World War," which means perhaps between 1913 and 1914 (Miner, "Pound," p. 572). There is also another ambiguity with respect to the time and circumstance of Pound's learning about "the usefulness of Japanese poetry from Flint." Flint's interest in Japanese poetry is indicated in his own account of the matter, published in The Egoist for May 1, 1915: "I had been advocating in the course of a series of articles on recent books of verse a poetry in vers libre, akin in spirit to the Japanese" (Miner, Japanese Tradition, p. 100).

⁴ For Noguchi's life and work, see Yoshinobu Hakutani, ed., Selected English Writings of Yone Noguchi: An East-West Literary Assimilation, vol. 1, Poetry (Cranbury, N.J., 1990), and vol. 2, Prose (Cranbury, N.J., 1992). For the most recent study of Noguchi's life, including an interview with his son, the late American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, see Hakutani, "Father and Son: A Conversation with Isamu Noguchi," Journal of Modern Literature (in press). For a discussion of Noguchi's English poetry and literary criticism, see Hakutani, "Yone Noguchi's Poetry: From Whitman to Zen," Comparative Literature Studies 22 (Spring 1985): 67-79.

⁵Ezra Pound, "As for Imagisme," New Age 14 (1915): 349.

⁶The impact of hokku on Pound was apparently greater and more beneficial than that on his fellow imagists. Regarding the form of superposition as ideal for expressing instantaneous perception, Pound wrote in a footnote: "Mr. Flint and Mr. Rodker have made longer poems depending on a similar presentation of matter. So also have Richard Aldington, in his In Via Sestina, and "H.. D.' in her Oread, which latter poems express much stronger emotions than that in my lines here given" ("Vorticism," p. 467). Pound's argument here suggests that hokku and Pound's hokku-like poems can express instantaneous and spontaneous perception better than can the longer poems and the poems with stronger emotions.

⁷ E. A. Sharp, William Sharp [Fiona Macleod]: A Memoir (London, 1910), pp. 280-81.

⁸ Yone Noguchi, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" Rhythm 11 (1913): 354-59. The essay was reprinted in Noguchi's Through the Torii (London, 1914; Boston, 1922), pp. 126-39. The page numbers cited hereafter refer to the Rhythm version.

⁹ Noguchi, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" p. 355.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ In a November 24, 1913, letter to Pound, Mary Fenollosa wrote: "I am beginning with [sic] right now, to send you material." On the following day she wrote again: "Please don't get discouraged at the ragged way this manuscript is coming to you. As I said yesterday, it will all get there in time, which is the most important thing." See Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays, ed. Sanehide Kodama (Redding Ridge, Conn., 1987), p. 6.

¹² Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (New York, 1936), p. 8.

¹³ One of Pound's critics who acknowledge this fact, Roy E. Teele, demonstrates Fenollosa's failure to understand the Japanese language, particularly the essential rhythm of the noh text Fenollosa translated. See Roy E. Teele, "The Japanese Translations," Texas Quarterly 10 (1967): 61-66.

¹⁴ Earl Miner, who states that Pound knew nothing about Japanese poetry before 1913 or 1914, believes that Pound later learned about hokku in the writings of the French translators (Miner, "Pound," pp. 572-73).

¹⁵Ezra Pound and Japan, p. 4.

¹⁶Yone Noguchi, Collected English Letters, ed. Ikuko Atsumi (Tokyo, 1975), pp. 210-11.

¹⁷ See Yone Noguchi, "The Everlasting Sorrow: A Japanese Noh Play," The Egoist 4 (October 1917): 141-43, and "The Japanese Noh Play," The Egoist 5 (August 1918): 99.

¹⁸See K. L. Goodwin, The Influence of Ezra Pound (London, 1966), p. 32.

¹⁹ Noguchi first met Yeats in 1903 as indicated in a letter Noguchi wrote to Leonie Gilmour, his first wife: "I made many a nice young, lovely, kind friend among literary genius (attention!) W. B. Yeats or Laurence Binyon, Moore and Bridges. They are so good; they invite me almost every day" (Noguchi, Collected English Letters, p. 106). In 1921, Yeats in Oxford wrote to Noguchi in Tokyo: "Though I have been so long in writing[,] your "Hiroshige' has given me the greatest pleasure. I take more and more pleasure from oriental art; find more and more that it accords with what I aim at in my own work. The European painter of the last two or three hundred years grows strange to me as I grow older, begins to speak as with a foreign tongue. . . . The old French poets were simple as the modern are not, & I find in Francois Villon the same thoughts, with more intellectual power, that I find in the Gaelic poet [Raftery]. I would be simple myself but I do not know how. I am always turning over pages like those you have sent me, hoping that in my old age I may discover how. . . . A form of beauty scarcely lasts a generation with us, but it lasts with you for centuries. You no more want to change it than a pious man wants to change the Lord's Prayer, or the Crucifix on the wall [blurred] at least not unless we have infected you with our egotism" (Noguchi, Collected English Letters, pp. 220-21).

²⁰ Goodwin, p. 32.

²¹ See William Pratt, The Imagist Poem (New York, 1963), pp. 14-15; J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908-1917 (New York, 1975), p. 17; Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston, 1988), p. 115.

²² It is speculative, of course, but quite possible that Aldington, fascinated by Japanese visual arts, might have read the three articles Noguchi published about the subject in this period: "Utamaro," Rhythm 11, no. 10 (1912): 257-60, "Koyetsu," Rhythm 11, no. 11 (1912): 302-5, "The Last Master [Yoshitoshi] of the Ukiyoye School," Transactions of the Japan Society of London 12 (1914): 144-56. Moreover, Yone Noguchi, The Spirit of Japanese Art (London, 1915) includes chapters on major Japanese painters such as Koyetsu, Kenzan, Kyosai, and Busho Hara, besides Utamaro and Hiroshige. If Aldington had read these essays, he would very well have been acquainted with Noguchi's writings about Japanese poetics.

²³ Aldington's poem reads:

The apparition of these poems in a crowd:
White faces in a black dead faint.

See Aldington, "Penultimate Poetry," The Egoist (January 15, 1915). This poem sounds more like senryu, a humorous haiku, than the hokku Pound was advocating.

²⁴ Donald Davie, Ezra Pound (New York, 1975), p. 42; Carpenter, p. 247.

²⁵ Compare Harmer, p. 38.

²⁶ Miner, "Pound" (n. 3 above), p. 572.

²⁷ See Usaburo Toyama, ed., Essays on Yone Noguchi (Tokyo, 1975), 1:327. (The text is mostly in Japanese.) Toyama, an art historian, was married to Noguchi's daughter Hifumi.

²⁸ A. R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme (Boston, 1960), p. 122. Neither Noel Stock, in Poet in Exile: Ezra Pound (Manchester, 1964), nor Humphrey Carpenter in A Serious Character mentions Pound's activities at the Quest Society, let alone Pound's possible interactions with Noguchi.

²⁹ See T. S. Eliot, ed. and introduction, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Conn., 1954), p. 23.

³⁰ Noguchi, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" (n. 8 above), p. 355.

³¹ About this time Noguchi also wrote an essay entitled "A Japanese Note on Yeats," included in Through the Torii (n. 8 above), pp. 110-17.

³² Noguchi's "Tell Me the Street to Heaven" was first published in his essay, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" (p. 358) and reprinted in Through the Torii. "Is It, Oh, List" was also included in the same issue and reprinted in Through the Torii with a change in the third line: "So runs Thames, so runs my Life" (p. 136).

³³ Ezra Pound, Personae (New York, 1926), p. 109.

³⁴ Ibid., pp. 109-11.

³⁵ Eliot, ed., p. 4.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ See T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York, 1932), pp. 8-10.

³⁸ Noguchi, Through the Torii, p. 159.

³⁹ The original in Japanese reads "Hiya hiya to / Kabe wo fumaete / Hirune kana." See Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), p. 49. The English translation of this hokku is mine.

⁴⁰ Pound, Personae, p. 100.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 108.

⁴² Alan Durant tries to show that Pound's metro poem contains a number of metaphors and associations, and that it is not as imagistic as critics say. While Durant's interpretation holds insofar as the various elements in the poem appear to the reader as metaphors and associations, Pound's intention does differ from the emphases of such an interpretation. The same thing may occur in the interpretation of a Japanese hokku, but traditionally the language of the hokku, as Noguchi demonstrates throughout The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (London, 1914), shuns metaphor and symbolism. See Alan Durant, "Pound, Modernism and Literary Criticism: A Reply to Donald Davie," Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 154-66.

⁴³ Eliot, ed. (n. 29 above), p. 4.

⁴⁴ Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London, 1910; reprint, New York, 1968), p. 97.

⁴⁵ Noguchi, "Again on Hokku," in Through the Torii (n. 8 above), pp. 140-46. A verbatim account is given in the introduction to his Japanese Hokkus (Boston, 1920), pp. 22-23. For Noguchi's London experiences, see "My First London Experience (1903)," and "Again in London (1913-14)," in The Story of Yone Noguchi Told by Himself (London, 1914), pp. 119-65.

⁴⁶ The union of different experiences is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's statement about an amalgamation. In reference to John Donne's poetry, Eliot writes, "When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes" (Selected Essays, p. 247).

⁴⁷ In The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, Noguchi wrote, "As the so-called literary expression is a secondary matter in the realm of poetry, there is no strict boundary between the domains generally called subjective and objective; while some Hokku poems appear to be objective, those poems are again by turns quite subjective through the great virtue of the writers having the fullest identification with the matter written on. You might call such collation poetical trespassing; but it is the very point whence the Japanese poetry gains unusual freedom; that freedom makes us join at once with the soul of Nature" (pp. 43-44).

⁴⁸ Noguchi, "What Is a Hokku Poem?" p. 357.

⁴⁹ Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London, 1916; reprint, New York, 1970), pp. 120-21.

⁵⁰ Yone Noguchi, The Pilgrimage (London, 1908), 1:68.

⁵¹ To the Japanese, such expressions as "the light of passion" and "the cicada's song" immediately evoke images of hot summer. These phrases in Japanese are attributed to or closely associated with summer.

⁵² For Whitman's influence on Noguchi, see Hakutani, "Yone Noguchi's Poetry: From Whitman to Zen" (n. 4 above): "Like Whitman, Noguchi believes in monism, and his ultimate goal in writing poetry is to achieve the ecstasies of the self in nature. . . . Though he became a different kind of nature poet after he returned to Japan, his later poems still bear out Whitman's influence" (p. 69).