ment and a climax, or any such requirement. But when the art of properly fitting the verses was lost, linked-verse dropped immediately to what it had been at its inception, a parlour game, and as such was abandoned by the important Japanese poets. Such men as Issa (1763–1828) preferred to devote their energies to the haiku, which became and has remained the favourite poetic form of the Japanese people.
It was the haiku also which first attracted the attention of Western poets, particularly those of the imagist school. Almost all the poets represented in the first imagist anthology were fascinated by the miniature Japanese verses with their sharp evocative images, and some composed imitations.[1] Richard Aldington tells how
One frosty night when the guns were still
I leaned against the trench
Making for myself hokku
Of the moon and flowers and of the snow.[2]
Slim volumes with such revealing titles as Pictures of the Floating World and Japanese Prints indicate how congenial these poets found the haiku, and, although the main thesis of this school, that poetic ideas are best expressed by the rendering of concrete images rather than by comments, need not have been learned from Japanese poetry, it is hard to think of any other poetic literature which so completely incarnates this view.
- ↑ F. S. Flint wrote in 1915 about the origins of the imagist school of poetry, “I think that what brought the real nucleus of this group together was a dissatisfaction with English poetry as it was then (and is still, alas!) being written. We proposed at various times to replace it by pure vers libre; by the Japanese tanka and haikai; we all wrote dozens of the latter as an amusement.” (Quoted in Hughes, Imagism, p. 11.)
- ↑ The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington, p. 86.
