Japanese Poets Research Articles

Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature

Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature

Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature.

Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature.

Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature

Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature

Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature

Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature

Some Japanese Portraits.

Illuminates the wealth, themes, and character of Japanese literature from the fifteenth century to 1912 by introducing Western readers to the life, work, and literary style of twenty-one Japanese poets and writers.

Three Contemporary Japanese Poets

Three Contemporary Japanese Poets

Ten Japanese Poets.

Ten Japanese Poets.

Ten Japanese Poets

Ten Japanese Poets

The Waste Land and Contemporary Japanese Poetry

IN POSTWAR Japan, one of the most read and the most often discussed Western poets is T. S. Eliot. In spite of their unusual difficulty, his poetry and his poetic drama have attracted the attention of those who are interested in poetry, and stimulated, as in other countries, many young poets to attempt the Eliotian style. It is said that there are about two thousand poets and more than two hundred poetry magazines in Japan today. Roughly speaking, the poets are divided into five groups: (1) a group publishing the magazine, Vou, under the flag of new humanism; (2) Jikan (time), with neorealism as their motto, trying to depict the gap between reality and the socialistic ideal as simply as possible; (3) the Communist group; (4) Rekitei (progress), mixing Chinese Han poetry and the traditional Japanese lyric, and (5) Arechi (waste land). This last group, including about twenty poets, concerns us here. I shall attempt to indicate what Eliot's waste land of Western civilization has to do with the waste land of postwar Japan, and how these Japanese poets have reacted to Eliot's poems. A limiting difficulty is the fact that the materials for this study available in America include only two volumes of Arechi, both published in 1953, and a small Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry, published in 1957, which contains some poems by the Arechi writers. Another difficulty arises from the fact that we are dealing with comparatively young men whose permanent place as poets is still in question. This study can be, therefore, only an introductory note.

The Phoenix And The Bees.

Merrill Moore's dozen volumes of sonnet-like verse and Henry Wells charming Life of Moore, which he quarried largely out of quotations from the sonnets, have been discussed in reviews here in the past. Phoenix And The Bees, Merrill Moore's last poetic work, completed just before his untimely death, finds him essaying a new form, the quatrain. The method and style are reminiscent of Fitzgerald's handling of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. There are suggestions of the little poetic silhouettes of Japanese poets and the classic restraint and compression of Greek and Roman poets as well as some of the mysticism of the Orient. If I can trust my own response, these quatrains will rank much higher than the majority of his sonnets. It was Merrill Moore's unique facility with words and a curious intellectual template which so readily brought his thoughts into the form of sonnets as well as