Making it new: discuss the poetic importations of Japanese and Western literary traditions in the works of Ezra Pound, with specific reference to Canto IV.
Fascist propagandist, Il Miglior Fabbro[1], the centre of modernism; Ezra Weston Loomis Pound has been perceived as each of these. Each has a certain validity, yet none succeeds in portraying the man entirely. Rather, he seems a composite of all of these, and much more. His iconic works, The Cantos can equally be seen as a composite: of ancient and modern, of Eastern and Western, even of Heaven and Hell.
Ezra Pound’s translations have received much attention: their accuracy, authenticity and legitimacy have been challenged and praised in equal measure for well over half a century. Yet Pound was clearly more than merely a translator: he built and developed from numerous and varied sources, always with the aim to “make it new”. Within his vast works, myths entangle, cultures collide and great works of other poets are gathered and fused with his own. As Pound himself tells us, “great poets seldom make bricks without straw; they pile up all the excellences they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, and then set their own inimitable light atop of the mountain.”[2] It is perhaps in part due to the range and depth of sources built from that Pound’s “inimitable light” still shines so brightly today.
This essay seeks to examine the importation, translation and development of both Western and Japanese poetic tropes, styles and forms in the works of Ezra Pound. Beginning, by introduction, with Pound’s development of the Haiku for a Western audience, I shall then concentrate more specifically on the fusion of Japanese and Western influences in Canto IV. By exploring ‘poetic translation and importation’, I do not mean to question the accuracy of the literal translation of foreign poets and writers employed by Pound; this would be both valid and interesting, but best left to linguists. I mean to explore the ways in which Ezra Pound engages with a multitude of texts, cultures and myth, and ‘makes them new’ in his own verse.
One must be careful, however, when discussing foreign modes and more vaguely foreign ‘themes’, not to generalise. When looking at Japanese modes in Pound’s work, it is worth noting that he was firstly, and most directly aware of them via the French writers of the time. In as much, Pound can at times be seen to employ elements of Japonerie (the West’s perhaps cliché perception of Japanese art). I shall not focus on these, looking only at genuinely Japanese features. Yet if Pound is capable of making such a faux pas, the likelihood that I fall into a similar trap seems much greater, and so these elements must be approached with caution.
Pound’s early Haiku seem an obvious place to begin a discussion of ‘poetic importation’ in his work. Building from their Japanese origins, Pound transforms a centuries-old form and ‘makes it new’, as is exemplified in the poem “Alba”:
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
While pedants will point to the fact that this poem has a title (which Haiku traditionally do not) and that there are too many syllables (although we should count Onji, morae in phonology, not syllables, anyway), “Alba” clearly resonates with the Japanese literary tradition it pays tribute to. As is the essence of haiku, Pound beautifully captures and evokes the sensation experienced; awakening with a lover.
“Alba” contains numerous elements found in traditional Haiku. For example, although perhaps not instantly apparent to Western readers, the inclusion of the kigo (the seasonal word, crucial to traditional Japanese haiku) is key to the poem’s success. Importantly, kigo are not simply words vaguely suggestive of a season: they are a determined list of seasonal words (set by Nijo Yoshimoto, in the Fourteenth Century[3]). Each has a specific connotation, designed as tell-tale signs to the reader of the precise time of writing, and concomitantly the background to the poem. In “Alba” the kigo “lily-of-the-valley”, or “suzuran” in Japanese, suggests more than merely the plant itself; it is a summer kigo, and is traditionally found in mountain regions. In as much, Pound does not simply nod in the direction of the Japanese haiku, but uses the kigo for practical results: the poem has been located within a specific time and place. Furthermore, and quite obviously, the “lily-of-the-valley” provides a comparison with the lover, fusing the natural world with the woman in the persona’s arms.
The critic and haiku poet Yone Noguchi argues that Pound fails to create genuine haiku. Inhibited by a Western affinity to literary expression (rather than the expression of the moment itself), Noguchi suggests that Pound fails to reach the “true sensation of being” required for haiku. “To attach too closely to the subject matter in literary expression” Noguchi argues, “is never a way to complete the real saturation”[4]. Read as a cliché comparison to the woman, the “lily-of-the-valley” would indeed be the stumbling block at which the poem fails, for the very reasons stated by Noguchi.
It seems, however, that the “lily-of-the-valley” is not mentioned merely for lyrical comparison, but is a further element truly present in the moment expressed. Read literally, the lovers are in a dew-drenched mountain field, and so the persona feels both the “pale wet leaves” and his lover’s body besides him. Both contribute to the heightened sense of reality presented in the poem: a pretty, but cliché, image is transformed and the poem achieves “real saturation” and becomes true haiku.
If Pound succeeds in creating an authentic haiku in the Japanese style, “Alba” also features, albeit more subtly perhaps, elements of the Western tradition. The poem is an aubade – literally a song to the morning, yet simultaneously an evocation of the beauty in the intense moment of post-coital bliss. A perfect image for Haiku, arguably, but undeniably from the Troubadour tradition, not the Japanese. While suggesting the effulgence that fills the poem and wakes the lovers (Alba literally means ‘sunrise’), an alba is also a subgenre of the aubade, with its origin in Occitan lyric poetry. Traditionally, such poems were written against the waking sun, in a bid by the lovers to maintain their bliss a while longer. Yet Pound takes this further, and, through the aide of the Japanese form, captures this moment of bliss and makes the ephemeral permanent.
Clearly then, East meets West in this poem. Pound draws from the cultures of both. Despite the heterogeneous and exotic confluences contributing to the poem, “Alba” is not made obscure by their presence. Pound’s ability to employ such esoteric references while maintaining perfect clarity in the poem is a tribute to his huge skill. Even to readers unaware of “Alba’s” debts to both Yoshimoto and the tanka poetic tradition, as well as to the Troubadour tradition, the poem succeeds in capturing a moment of beauty, and can stand supported by its aesthetic successes alone.
Undeniably, however, the arresting quality imbued within these three-lines is deeply enhanced by both the Japanese and Western traditions, employed in such a typically Poundian way. While drawing on two thoroughly different, centuries-old literary traditions, the poem does not get lost in its own anachronistic references; as Hugh Gordon Porteus has said, “Pound produces living poems, and not stuffed museum specimens that are true to everything else except life.”[5]
Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” offers a similar fusion of Japanese and Western literary traditions. By now it seems almost compulsory to open any discussion of the ‘Metro’ poem by quoting Pound’s own notes on the cause of its genesis, and so I shall follow suit. Upon seeing a stream of beautiful faces on the Parisian underground, Pound tells us, he attempted poetry “as worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion [of seeing these faces.] I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it… six months later I made the following hokku-like sentence”[6]:
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Unlike Alba, many of the ‘Western’ elements within the poem become immediately apparent: rather than locating the poem in a typically Japanese setting, such as a perennial mountainside or some other abiding nature scene, the metropolitan location places the poem directly within modern life. Yet this is not to the detriment of the poem’s haiku qualities; the expression of the moment remains true to haiku principles, but coalesces with the modern and the urban.
William Pratt seemingly agrees, stating that “Pound in his two line imagist poem had deliberately converted the Oriental meditation on nature into a Western drama of reconciliation between the man-made and the natural world, between subjective and objective experience, a use of the haiku which the Japanese might find astonishing, but which is well suited to modern Western readers”[7].
While Pratt seems accurate in his assessment, his description of “IN A STATION OF THE METRO” as a “two line imagist poem” seems to demote the title somewhat. Traditional haiku, as mentioned earlier, have no titles, but here the title is essential. Admittedly, whether we call it a ‘title’ or ‘the first of three lines’ hardly matters, but, either way, it serves a great purpose: it fuses the synthetic, manmade, with nature in one double-image. The dark urban station and the displaced petals form a surreal juxtaposition, showing the disconnected realities of modern life; the petals cannot survive in the lightless conditions of the subway.
Hugh Kenner seemingly agrees: “We need the title so that we can savour that vegetal contrast with the world of machines […]. Flowers, underground; flowers, out of the sun; flowers seen as if against a natural gleam, the bough’s wetness gleaming in its darkness, in this place where wheels turn and nothing grows.”[8]
Yet Kenner continues, arguing that “this is not any crowd, moreover, but a crowd seen underground, as Odysseus and Orpheus and Koré saw crowds in Hades.”[9] This suggestion is interesting, yet is somewhat unqualified. It is tempting to follow Kenner’s thought; the image of Pound as an Orpheus figure is particularly intriguing, and certainly appropriate to elements of The Cantos. Yet the image presented in the poem is not hellish, but beautiful. Rather than presenting damnation in the “hell” of modernity, as Kenner seems to suggest, Pound finds beauty in it. Pound celebrates the petals and the “apparition” of the “faces in the crowd” equally.
If Pound succeeded in combining East and West in the brief haiku, the challenge will certainly be greater in a “poem of some length”. Clearly The Cantos contains numerous importations from both Eastern and Western Traditions. The opening Cantos are grounded quite firmly in the Western tradition, but by Canto IV, we see a more global approach developing. Canto IV is a Canto of repetition: legends and characters echo one another with striking similarities. Like the first three Canto, Western Tradition dominates initially:
IV
Palace in smoky light,
Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones,
ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!
Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!
The silver mirrors catch the bright stones and flare,
Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light;
Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving.
Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf
under the apple trees,
Choros nympharum, goat-foot, with the pale foot alternate;
Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows,
A black cock crows in the sea-foam;
This Canto begins with the destruction of the source of Western culture; “Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones.” This is quickly followed by a cry for a revival for culture and poetry; “ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia! / Hear me.” Cadmus follows, setting out to discover the fate of his sister Europa, just as Pound seeks to discover the fate of Europe. The outlook does not look good. Images of waste and destruction are contrasted with the power of poetry (Aurunculeia), and nature’s abundance.
American literature is fused also, evoking Whitman’s rally call from “Drum Taps” (“Beat, beat, whirr, pound”[10]), yet Pound has altered the setting:
Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf
under the apple trees
Significantly, this is not located in the streets of Manhattan, in a country preparing for civil war, (as in Whitman) but an orchard, where a chorus of nymphs dwell, reaffirming Guy Davenport’s suggestion that we see “splendour and violence yoked in the effort to suggest that out of tragedy comes a radiance.”[11] Yet, more tragedy is to come before this promised radiance can be realised.
Starting with destruction caused by fighting over Helen of Troy, Pound presents us with a series of wars and violent episodes running throughout Western history and culture, each driven by lust. Stories repeat and metamorphose throughout Canto IV: that the tale of Ityn and Filomelle resonates with the story of Cabestan and Seramunda is by now a much stated point. Similarly, Vidal, dressed as a wolf, is eaten by his own hounds, as is Acteon.
Yet Pound does not simply randomly jump from myth to (sometimes obscure) myth, but builds from each successively. Pound demands our knowledge of these subjects, subjects he believes we should in fact be well aware of. Daniel Albright suggests “Pound cunningly arrests and arranges these bright shards of narratives in such a way that they seem all part of a single incurved action”[12]. Indeed, Pound’s great skill is in the intertwining of these strands. When the narrative breaks, it is because our ignorance betrays us; and when we fall, it is because we do not know our own tradition.
If Pound is demanding of us as readers concerning the Western tradition, he is more lenient when it comes to the Eastern tradition. He insinuates more. He forgives us our ignorance of another tradition, and will teach us, but demands we know our own sufficiently to begin with. Pound takes the examples of discordant violence that permeate Western culture, and then sets them up with an alternative. In the West we saw only betraying Wives and Husbands, in the East we see a greater harmony: “The pine at Takasago / grows with the pine of Isé”, relating the tale of a generous natured couple metamorphosed into pine trees so as to be entwined forever.
There are further traces of Japanese influence within the Canto IV. Ursula Shioji sees “hokku-like” elements present, guiding her readers through multiple images and attributing them to Japanese sources. While she does at times (oddly considering her nationality) border on Japanese cliché’s, her argument seems most successful when discussing Pound’s ability to “represent an intersection of the components of time and timelessness”, as can be seen in “classical haiku as Basho conceived it”[13].
The most obvious image of “time and timelessness” in Canto IV is clearly that of the “Ply over ply”, a perfect marriage of the constant with the transient.
Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil
The liquid and rushing crystal
beneath the knees of the gods.
Ply over ply, thin glitter of water;
Brook film bearing white petals.
Shioji points out that “the word ‘ply’ is rather unusual in this context. It is normally used in connection with solid substances but not in connection with fluids. The ‘image’ of ‘ply over ply’ suggests a sudden solidifying of the water; the ripples of the brook ‘freeze’ so to speak.” [14] Oddly, however, Shioji does not connect this with the layering effect of cultures and histories that seems so central to this Canto. While the ‘plies’ of water do suggest “a strange state of suspense between stasis and dynamism”[15], it is the cultural suspension that is most interesting. For Shioji “the “hokku-like” elements” serve only to “evoke a beautiful scenery which constitutes the backdrop against which a drama unfolds: the drama of love and passion, violence, violation, and revenge.”[16]
It is worth noting here that the term hokku has changed its meaning over the years for Western readers; when Pound used it, it was practically synonymous with haiku. Shioji, on the other hand, clearly uses the term “hokku-like” for its echo of Pound’s own Vortex notes, and to suggest a ‘vaguely Japanese’ quality rather than a technical similarity between Pound’s Canto IV and true Japanese poetics. More interestingly, its original use, meaning specifically the opening stanza of a renga, seems particularly relevant to Pound’s Canto IV. William Higginson’s glossary explains more:
“Hokku (starting verse) Originally, in renga, the first stanza, which later became an independent poem, now usually called haiku in Japan, with hokku reverting to its original meaning. For a time hokku was the most common word in English for what we now call haiku.”[17]
When we consider that renga are linked poems “usually composed by two or more poets, and developing texture by shifting among several traditional topics without narrative progression” [18], Canto IV truly seems “hokku-like”. Perhaps a look at a traditional renga will shed a little light here:
With a bit of madness in me,
Which is poetry,
I plod along like Chikusai
Among the wails of the wind.
Who is it that runs with hurried steps,
Flowers of sasanqua dancing on his hat?
Under the pale sky of dawn,
I importuned a water official to pose as a tavern keeper.
A customer having arrived, his red horse
Stands shaking his head moist with dew.
This renga extract, entitled “The Wails of the Wind” is begun by the poet Bashō, followed by Yasui, then Kakei, and finally Jūgo. Similarly, Pound’s Canto IV (and indeed The Cantos as a whole) is a collaborative effort: Homer, Ovid, Horace, Catullus, Browning, Whitman, and So-Gyoku all partake in the creation of Pound’s ‘renga’, to name but a few. George Kearnes, although not commenting on the renga-like quality of the text, points to the multiple voices absorbed within it, and recognises that they are used to stretch the reader beyond the myopic, West-centric view of the world.
“The reader may well feel bewildered by Pound’s extraordinary in-gathering of texts and traditions, including Homeric and Ovidian myth, Confucian ethics, and neo-platonic Light. That bewilderment, however, is part of the poem’s assault upon our received sense of history and values. The Cantos invites us to enter a powerful counter-history, one radically opposed to the dominant order of the modern world, including the ‘logic’ and ‘reason’ that support it.”[19]
Certainly, this “ingathering of texts and traditions” constantly brings our “received sense of history and values” into question. Furthermore, the concept of traditions and motifs layered “ply over ply” is strikingly suggestive of the techniques of ‘echo’ (hibiki) and ‘reflection’ (utsuri) that link themes and moods between stanzas in the Bashō school of renga. In traditional renga the result is that “one feels a unity, a magnetism between the stanzas”[20] as can certainly be said of Pound’s Canto IV, and The Cantos in general. The four strands of narrative in “The Wails of the Wind” flow and intertwine with each other just as Pound’s multiple narratives do.
Furthermore, the numerous kigo (‘seasonal words’ mentioned previously) also suggests Pound is writing a hokku (starting verse, remember, not haiku) in Canto IV as an introduction to the renga that is The Cantos in its entirety. Lines 6 and 7 are reminiscent of the haiku “Alba”, discussed earlier. Another dawn scene is presented:
“Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light;
Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving.”
The “green cool light” is in stark contrast to the “smoky light” of smouldering Troy, again suggesting beauty born out of destruction. “Dew-haze” here serves as a kigo, an image of spring dawn. Numerous other kigo appear in Canto IV, continuing through the seasons. The “dew-haze” of spring, is followed by “saffron petals” suggesting mid summer. This is followed by “peach-trees [that] shed bright leaves in the water” in mid autumn, while waiting for rain (line 117) is a traditional winter kigo. Canto IV has traversed hundreds of centuries, thousands of miles, and spreads an entire year. Interestingly, theatre-going[21] is a New Year’s kigo, and in keeping with the expectation felt at the Canto’s close, (or the introductory hokku closes, anticipating the renga):
And we sit here ...
there in the arena ...
In summary then, Canto IV begins with the Western tradition, but peppers it with Japanese references and styles. Pound draws from Japanese tradition, both in form and content, with a greater understanding of their origins than he is often given credit for. Admittedly, the links made here between Bashō’s renga poetry and Pound’s Canto IV serve only as circumstantial evidence, but Bashō’s poetical theory is undeniably in keeping with Pound’s own. Bashō, like our guide through The Cantos, is a wandering poet seeking, to quote Yuasa Nobuyuki, “a vision of eternity in the things that are, by their own very nature, destined to perish.”[22] Basil Hall Chamberlain translates Bashō’s poetical maxim Fu-eki ryu-ko as “Unchanging truth in fleeting forms”[23], surely a maxim apt for The Cantos.
Much more remains to be said of the link between renga and The Cantos, requiring much greater knowledge of both than has been presented here. A further look at the fusion of the Troubadour tradition within Pound’s haiku would also be interesting and I think fruitful, particularly looking at Pound’s The Spirit of Romance translations. Nevertheless, some effort has been made here to point, perhaps ham-fistedly, at the genius of Pound’s ingathering of texts.
Referring to Pound’s “partial rejection of Western civilization, which he found distasteful”, Guiyou Huang suggests that Pound struggles with these two deep and divergent sources, believing that “The East-West clash inside his mind must have been painful”. Huang goes on to say, “but birth without pain is a myth.”[24] Yet in truth, the fusion seems painless: Pound manages to operate Japanese and Greco-Roman culture (and its descendents) in tandem. Both seem in dialogue with each other, complementing and completing each other throughout Pound’s work. Regardless of which title fits him most (a fascist propagandist, the centre of modernism, or the finer craftsman), Pound most obviously was a veracious omnivore, consuming many cultures, legends, poetic tropes, forms and traditions into the borderless realm that is The Cantos.
Word Count: 3684 Bibliography
Works Cited
Albright, Daniel. “Early Cantos I-XLI” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Bashō, Matsuo. The Narrow Road To the Deep North: and other travel sketches. London: Penguin Books, 1966.
Chamberlain, Basil Hall. Japanese Poetry. London: John Murray Publishers, 1911.
Davenport, Guy. “Ezra Pound's Radiant Gists: A Reading of Cantos II and IV”. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 50-64, Spring - Summer, 1962.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. London: Faber and Faber, 1940.
Higginson, William J. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku. London: Kodansha Europe, 1989.
Huang, Guiyou, “EZRA POUND: (MIS) TRANSLATION AND (RE-)CREATION”. Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 22, no. 1-2, pp. 221-30, Spring 1993
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971.
Kearns, George. EZRA POUND: The Cantos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Miner, Earl. “Pound, Haiku and the Image”. The Hudson Review. Vol IX, Number 4, Winter 1956-57.
Nicholls, Peter. “An Experiment with Time: Ezra Pound and the Example of Japanese Noh”. The Modern Language Review, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Jan., 1995), pp. 1-13
Noguchi, Yone. The Spirit of Japanese Poetry. London: J. Murray, 1934.
Porteus, Hugh Gordon. “Ezra Pound and His Chinese Character: a Radical Examination”. Ezra Pound. Ed. Peter Russell. London: Peter Nevill Limited, 1950.
Pound, Ezra The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1968.
------. “Vorticism” The Fortnightly Review, 571 (Sept . 1, 1914), pp. 461-71
------. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London, Faber and Faber, 1998.
------. “In a Station of the Metro”
------. “Alba”
Pratt, William. “Imagism and the Shape of English Poetry.” Homage to Imagism. Ed. William Pratt and Robert Richardson. New York: AMS Press, 1992.
Shioji, Ursula. “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”. Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 22, no. 1-2, pp. 221-30, Spring 1993
Sieburth, Richard. Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy De Gourmont. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Whitman, Walt. “Drum Taps”. Leaves of Grass. London: George G. Harrap and Co, 1920.
Xie, Ming. “Pound as Translator”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Further Works of Influence
Kita, Yoshiko. “Ezra Pound and Haiku: Why Did Imagists Hardly Mention Basho?” Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 179-91, Winter 2000.
Lin, Jyan-Lung. “Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' as a Yugen Haiku.”Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, vol. 21, no. 1-2, pp. 175-83, Spring 1992
Maerhofer Jr, John W. “Towards an Esthetic of Translation: An Examination of Ezra Pound’s Translation Theory.” Paideuma: a Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 29, no. 3, Winter 2000.
Miner, Earl. “Pound, Haiku, and the Image”. Hudson Review, vol. 9, pp. 570-584, 1957.
Terrell, Carroll F. A companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Maine: University of California Press in cooperation with the National Poetry Foundation, 1993.
[1] Eliot. The Waste Land. London: Faber and Faber, 1940.
[2] (p.162) Pound, The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1968.
[3] (p90) Higginson. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku. London: Kodansha Europe, 1989.
[4] (pp109-11) Noguchi. The Spirit of Japanese Poetry. London: J. Murray, 1934.
[5] (p207) Porteus. “Ezra Pound and His Chinese Character: a Radical Examination”. Ezra Pouns. Ed. Peter Russell. London: Peter Nevill Limited, 1950.
[6] (p463) Pound. “Vorticism” The Fortnightly Review, 571 (Sept . 1, 1914)
[7] (p82-82) Pratt, “Imagism and the Shape of English Poetry.” Homage to Imagism. Ed. William Pratt and Robert Richardson. New York: AMS Press, 1992.
[8] (p184-5) Kenner, The Pound Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971.
[9] (p184) Kenner,. The Pound Era.
[10] Whitman, “Drum Taps”. Leaves of Grass. London: George G. Harrap and Co, 1920.
[11](p57) Davenport, “Ezra Pound's Radiant Gists: A Reading of Cantos II and IV”. Wisconsin Studies in ContemporaryLiterature, Vol. 3, No. 2, Poetry Explication Issue (Spring - Summer, 1962), pp. 50-64
[12] (p67)Albright, “Early Cantos I-XLI” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[13] (p227) Shioji, “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”. Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 22, no. 1-2, pp. 221-30, Spring 1993
[14] (p227) Shioji, “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”.
[15] (p227) Shioji, “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”.
[16] (p227) Shioji, “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”.
[17] (pp289-290) Higginson, The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku. London: Kodansha Europe, 1989.
[18] (pp289-290) Higginson, The Haiku Handbook.
[19] (p82) Kearns, EZRA POUND:The Cantos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
[20] (p196) Higginson, The Haiku Handbook.
[21] (p286) Higginson, The Haiku Handbook.
[22] (p37) Yuasa, Nobuyuki. Introduction to Bashō’s The Narrow Road To the Deep North: and other Travel Sketches. London: Penguin Books, 1966.
[23] (p189) Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry. London: John Murray Publishers, 1911.
[24] (p113) Huang, “EZRA POUND: (MIS) TRANSLATION AND (RE-)CREATION”. Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 22, no. 1-2, pp. 221-30, Spring 1993
Fascist propagandist, Il Miglior Fabbro[1], the centre of modernism; Ezra Weston Loomis Pound has been perceived as each of these. Each has a certain validity, yet none succeeds in portraying the man entirely. Rather, he seems a composite of all of these, and much more. His iconic works, The Cantos can equally be seen as a composite: of ancient and modern, of Eastern and Western, even of Heaven and Hell.
Ezra Pound’s translations have received much attention: their accuracy, authenticity and legitimacy have been challenged and praised in equal measure for well over half a century. Yet Pound was clearly more than merely a translator: he built and developed from numerous and varied sources, always with the aim to “make it new”. Within his vast works, myths entangle, cultures collide and great works of other poets are gathered and fused with his own. As Pound himself tells us, “great poets seldom make bricks without straw; they pile up all the excellences they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, and then set their own inimitable light atop of the mountain.”[2] It is perhaps in part due to the range and depth of sources built from that Pound’s “inimitable light” still shines so brightly today.
This essay seeks to examine the importation, translation and development of both Western and Japanese poetic tropes, styles and forms in the works of Ezra Pound. Beginning, by introduction, with Pound’s development of the Haiku for a Western audience, I shall then concentrate more specifically on the fusion of Japanese and Western influences in Canto IV. By exploring ‘poetic translation and importation’, I do not mean to question the accuracy of the literal translation of foreign poets and writers employed by Pound; this would be both valid and interesting, but best left to linguists. I mean to explore the ways in which Ezra Pound engages with a multitude of texts, cultures and myth, and ‘makes them new’ in his own verse.
One must be careful, however, when discussing foreign modes and more vaguely foreign ‘themes’, not to generalise. When looking at Japanese modes in Pound’s work, it is worth noting that he was firstly, and most directly aware of them via the French writers of the time. In as much, Pound can at times be seen to employ elements of Japonerie (the West’s perhaps cliché perception of Japanese art). I shall not focus on these, looking only at genuinely Japanese features. Yet if Pound is capable of making such a faux pas, the likelihood that I fall into a similar trap seems much greater, and so these elements must be approached with caution.
Pound’s early Haiku seem an obvious place to begin a discussion of ‘poetic importation’ in his work. Building from their Japanese origins, Pound transforms a centuries-old form and ‘makes it new’, as is exemplified in the poem “Alba”:
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
While pedants will point to the fact that this poem has a title (which Haiku traditionally do not) and that there are too many syllables (although we should count Onji, morae in phonology, not syllables, anyway), “Alba” clearly resonates with the Japanese literary tradition it pays tribute to. As is the essence of haiku, Pound beautifully captures and evokes the sensation experienced; awakening with a lover.
“Alba” contains numerous elements found in traditional Haiku. For example, although perhaps not instantly apparent to Western readers, the inclusion of the kigo (the seasonal word, crucial to traditional Japanese haiku) is key to the poem’s success. Importantly, kigo are not simply words vaguely suggestive of a season: they are a determined list of seasonal words (set by Nijo Yoshimoto, in the Fourteenth Century[3]). Each has a specific connotation, designed as tell-tale signs to the reader of the precise time of writing, and concomitantly the background to the poem. In “Alba” the kigo “lily-of-the-valley”, or “suzuran” in Japanese, suggests more than merely the plant itself; it is a summer kigo, and is traditionally found in mountain regions. In as much, Pound does not simply nod in the direction of the Japanese haiku, but uses the kigo for practical results: the poem has been located within a specific time and place. Furthermore, and quite obviously, the “lily-of-the-valley” provides a comparison with the lover, fusing the natural world with the woman in the persona’s arms.
The critic and haiku poet Yone Noguchi argues that Pound fails to create genuine haiku. Inhibited by a Western affinity to literary expression (rather than the expression of the moment itself), Noguchi suggests that Pound fails to reach the “true sensation of being” required for haiku. “To attach too closely to the subject matter in literary expression” Noguchi argues, “is never a way to complete the real saturation”[4]. Read as a cliché comparison to the woman, the “lily-of-the-valley” would indeed be the stumbling block at which the poem fails, for the very reasons stated by Noguchi.
It seems, however, that the “lily-of-the-valley” is not mentioned merely for lyrical comparison, but is a further element truly present in the moment expressed. Read literally, the lovers are in a dew-drenched mountain field, and so the persona feels both the “pale wet leaves” and his lover’s body besides him. Both contribute to the heightened sense of reality presented in the poem: a pretty, but cliché, image is transformed and the poem achieves “real saturation” and becomes true haiku.
If Pound succeeds in creating an authentic haiku in the Japanese style, “Alba” also features, albeit more subtly perhaps, elements of the Western tradition. The poem is an aubade – literally a song to the morning, yet simultaneously an evocation of the beauty in the intense moment of post-coital bliss. A perfect image for Haiku, arguably, but undeniably from the Troubadour tradition, not the Japanese. While suggesting the effulgence that fills the poem and wakes the lovers (Alba literally means ‘sunrise’), an alba is also a subgenre of the aubade, with its origin in Occitan lyric poetry. Traditionally, such poems were written against the waking sun, in a bid by the lovers to maintain their bliss a while longer. Yet Pound takes this further, and, through the aide of the Japanese form, captures this moment of bliss and makes the ephemeral permanent.
Clearly then, East meets West in this poem. Pound draws from the cultures of both. Despite the heterogeneous and exotic confluences contributing to the poem, “Alba” is not made obscure by their presence. Pound’s ability to employ such esoteric references while maintaining perfect clarity in the poem is a tribute to his huge skill. Even to readers unaware of “Alba’s” debts to both Yoshimoto and the tanka poetic tradition, as well as to the Troubadour tradition, the poem succeeds in capturing a moment of beauty, and can stand supported by its aesthetic successes alone.
Undeniably, however, the arresting quality imbued within these three-lines is deeply enhanced by both the Japanese and Western traditions, employed in such a typically Poundian way. While drawing on two thoroughly different, centuries-old literary traditions, the poem does not get lost in its own anachronistic references; as Hugh Gordon Porteus has said, “Pound produces living poems, and not stuffed museum specimens that are true to everything else except life.”[5]
Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” offers a similar fusion of Japanese and Western literary traditions. By now it seems almost compulsory to open any discussion of the ‘Metro’ poem by quoting Pound’s own notes on the cause of its genesis, and so I shall follow suit. Upon seeing a stream of beautiful faces on the Parisian underground, Pound tells us, he attempted poetry “as worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion [of seeing these faces.] I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it… six months later I made the following hokku-like sentence”[6]:
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Unlike Alba, many of the ‘Western’ elements within the poem become immediately apparent: rather than locating the poem in a typically Japanese setting, such as a perennial mountainside or some other abiding nature scene, the metropolitan location places the poem directly within modern life. Yet this is not to the detriment of the poem’s haiku qualities; the expression of the moment remains true to haiku principles, but coalesces with the modern and the urban.
William Pratt seemingly agrees, stating that “Pound in his two line imagist poem had deliberately converted the Oriental meditation on nature into a Western drama of reconciliation between the man-made and the natural world, between subjective and objective experience, a use of the haiku which the Japanese might find astonishing, but which is well suited to modern Western readers”[7].
While Pratt seems accurate in his assessment, his description of “IN A STATION OF THE METRO” as a “two line imagist poem” seems to demote the title somewhat. Traditional haiku, as mentioned earlier, have no titles, but here the title is essential. Admittedly, whether we call it a ‘title’ or ‘the first of three lines’ hardly matters, but, either way, it serves a great purpose: it fuses the synthetic, manmade, with nature in one double-image. The dark urban station and the displaced petals form a surreal juxtaposition, showing the disconnected realities of modern life; the petals cannot survive in the lightless conditions of the subway.
Hugh Kenner seemingly agrees: “We need the title so that we can savour that vegetal contrast with the world of machines […]. Flowers, underground; flowers, out of the sun; flowers seen as if against a natural gleam, the bough’s wetness gleaming in its darkness, in this place where wheels turn and nothing grows.”[8]
Yet Kenner continues, arguing that “this is not any crowd, moreover, but a crowd seen underground, as Odysseus and Orpheus and Koré saw crowds in Hades.”[9] This suggestion is interesting, yet is somewhat unqualified. It is tempting to follow Kenner’s thought; the image of Pound as an Orpheus figure is particularly intriguing, and certainly appropriate to elements of The Cantos. Yet the image presented in the poem is not hellish, but beautiful. Rather than presenting damnation in the “hell” of modernity, as Kenner seems to suggest, Pound finds beauty in it. Pound celebrates the petals and the “apparition” of the “faces in the crowd” equally.
If Pound succeeded in combining East and West in the brief haiku, the challenge will certainly be greater in a “poem of some length”. Clearly The Cantos contains numerous importations from both Eastern and Western Traditions. The opening Cantos are grounded quite firmly in the Western tradition, but by Canto IV, we see a more global approach developing. Canto IV is a Canto of repetition: legends and characters echo one another with striking similarities. Like the first three Canto, Western Tradition dominates initially:
IV
Palace in smoky light,
Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones,
ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!
Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!
The silver mirrors catch the bright stones and flare,
Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light;
Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving.
Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf
under the apple trees,
Choros nympharum, goat-foot, with the pale foot alternate;
Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows,
A black cock crows in the sea-foam;
This Canto begins with the destruction of the source of Western culture; “Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones.” This is quickly followed by a cry for a revival for culture and poetry; “ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia! / Hear me.” Cadmus follows, setting out to discover the fate of his sister Europa, just as Pound seeks to discover the fate of Europe. The outlook does not look good. Images of waste and destruction are contrasted with the power of poetry (Aurunculeia), and nature’s abundance.
American literature is fused also, evoking Whitman’s rally call from “Drum Taps” (“Beat, beat, whirr, pound”[10]), yet Pound has altered the setting:
Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf
under the apple trees
Significantly, this is not located in the streets of Manhattan, in a country preparing for civil war, (as in Whitman) but an orchard, where a chorus of nymphs dwell, reaffirming Guy Davenport’s suggestion that we see “splendour and violence yoked in the effort to suggest that out of tragedy comes a radiance.”[11] Yet, more tragedy is to come before this promised radiance can be realised.
Starting with destruction caused by fighting over Helen of Troy, Pound presents us with a series of wars and violent episodes running throughout Western history and culture, each driven by lust. Stories repeat and metamorphose throughout Canto IV: that the tale of Ityn and Filomelle resonates with the story of Cabestan and Seramunda is by now a much stated point. Similarly, Vidal, dressed as a wolf, is eaten by his own hounds, as is Acteon.
Yet Pound does not simply randomly jump from myth to (sometimes obscure) myth, but builds from each successively. Pound demands our knowledge of these subjects, subjects he believes we should in fact be well aware of. Daniel Albright suggests “Pound cunningly arrests and arranges these bright shards of narratives in such a way that they seem all part of a single incurved action”[12]. Indeed, Pound’s great skill is in the intertwining of these strands. When the narrative breaks, it is because our ignorance betrays us; and when we fall, it is because we do not know our own tradition.
If Pound is demanding of us as readers concerning the Western tradition, he is more lenient when it comes to the Eastern tradition. He insinuates more. He forgives us our ignorance of another tradition, and will teach us, but demands we know our own sufficiently to begin with. Pound takes the examples of discordant violence that permeate Western culture, and then sets them up with an alternative. In the West we saw only betraying Wives and Husbands, in the East we see a greater harmony: “The pine at Takasago / grows with the pine of Isé”, relating the tale of a generous natured couple metamorphosed into pine trees so as to be entwined forever.
There are further traces of Japanese influence within the Canto IV. Ursula Shioji sees “hokku-like” elements present, guiding her readers through multiple images and attributing them to Japanese sources. While she does at times (oddly considering her nationality) border on Japanese cliché’s, her argument seems most successful when discussing Pound’s ability to “represent an intersection of the components of time and timelessness”, as can be seen in “classical haiku as Basho conceived it”[13].
The most obvious image of “time and timelessness” in Canto IV is clearly that of the “Ply over ply”, a perfect marriage of the constant with the transient.
Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil
The liquid and rushing crystal
beneath the knees of the gods.
Ply over ply, thin glitter of water;
Brook film bearing white petals.
Shioji points out that “the word ‘ply’ is rather unusual in this context. It is normally used in connection with solid substances but not in connection with fluids. The ‘image’ of ‘ply over ply’ suggests a sudden solidifying of the water; the ripples of the brook ‘freeze’ so to speak.” [14] Oddly, however, Shioji does not connect this with the layering effect of cultures and histories that seems so central to this Canto. While the ‘plies’ of water do suggest “a strange state of suspense between stasis and dynamism”[15], it is the cultural suspension that is most interesting. For Shioji “the “hokku-like” elements” serve only to “evoke a beautiful scenery which constitutes the backdrop against which a drama unfolds: the drama of love and passion, violence, violation, and revenge.”[16]
It is worth noting here that the term hokku has changed its meaning over the years for Western readers; when Pound used it, it was practically synonymous with haiku. Shioji, on the other hand, clearly uses the term “hokku-like” for its echo of Pound’s own Vortex notes, and to suggest a ‘vaguely Japanese’ quality rather than a technical similarity between Pound’s Canto IV and true Japanese poetics. More interestingly, its original use, meaning specifically the opening stanza of a renga, seems particularly relevant to Pound’s Canto IV. William Higginson’s glossary explains more:
“Hokku (starting verse) Originally, in renga, the first stanza, which later became an independent poem, now usually called haiku in Japan, with hokku reverting to its original meaning. For a time hokku was the most common word in English for what we now call haiku.”[17]
When we consider that renga are linked poems “usually composed by two or more poets, and developing texture by shifting among several traditional topics without narrative progression” [18], Canto IV truly seems “hokku-like”. Perhaps a look at a traditional renga will shed a little light here:
With a bit of madness in me,
Which is poetry,
I plod along like Chikusai
Among the wails of the wind.
Who is it that runs with hurried steps,
Flowers of sasanqua dancing on his hat?
Under the pale sky of dawn,
I importuned a water official to pose as a tavern keeper.
A customer having arrived, his red horse
Stands shaking his head moist with dew.
This renga extract, entitled “The Wails of the Wind” is begun by the poet Bashō, followed by Yasui, then Kakei, and finally Jūgo. Similarly, Pound’s Canto IV (and indeed The Cantos as a whole) is a collaborative effort: Homer, Ovid, Horace, Catullus, Browning, Whitman, and So-Gyoku all partake in the creation of Pound’s ‘renga’, to name but a few. George Kearnes, although not commenting on the renga-like quality of the text, points to the multiple voices absorbed within it, and recognises that they are used to stretch the reader beyond the myopic, West-centric view of the world.
“The reader may well feel bewildered by Pound’s extraordinary in-gathering of texts and traditions, including Homeric and Ovidian myth, Confucian ethics, and neo-platonic Light. That bewilderment, however, is part of the poem’s assault upon our received sense of history and values. The Cantos invites us to enter a powerful counter-history, one radically opposed to the dominant order of the modern world, including the ‘logic’ and ‘reason’ that support it.”[19]
Certainly, this “ingathering of texts and traditions” constantly brings our “received sense of history and values” into question. Furthermore, the concept of traditions and motifs layered “ply over ply” is strikingly suggestive of the techniques of ‘echo’ (hibiki) and ‘reflection’ (utsuri) that link themes and moods between stanzas in the Bashō school of renga. In traditional renga the result is that “one feels a unity, a magnetism between the stanzas”[20] as can certainly be said of Pound’s Canto IV, and The Cantos in general. The four strands of narrative in “The Wails of the Wind” flow and intertwine with each other just as Pound’s multiple narratives do.
Furthermore, the numerous kigo (‘seasonal words’ mentioned previously) also suggests Pound is writing a hokku (starting verse, remember, not haiku) in Canto IV as an introduction to the renga that is The Cantos in its entirety. Lines 6 and 7 are reminiscent of the haiku “Alba”, discussed earlier. Another dawn scene is presented:
“Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green cool light;
Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving.”
The “green cool light” is in stark contrast to the “smoky light” of smouldering Troy, again suggesting beauty born out of destruction. “Dew-haze” here serves as a kigo, an image of spring dawn. Numerous other kigo appear in Canto IV, continuing through the seasons. The “dew-haze” of spring, is followed by “saffron petals” suggesting mid summer. This is followed by “peach-trees [that] shed bright leaves in the water” in mid autumn, while waiting for rain (line 117) is a traditional winter kigo. Canto IV has traversed hundreds of centuries, thousands of miles, and spreads an entire year. Interestingly, theatre-going[21] is a New Year’s kigo, and in keeping with the expectation felt at the Canto’s close, (or the introductory hokku closes, anticipating the renga):
And we sit here ...
there in the arena ...
In summary then, Canto IV begins with the Western tradition, but peppers it with Japanese references and styles. Pound draws from Japanese tradition, both in form and content, with a greater understanding of their origins than he is often given credit for. Admittedly, the links made here between Bashō’s renga poetry and Pound’s Canto IV serve only as circumstantial evidence, but Bashō’s poetical theory is undeniably in keeping with Pound’s own. Bashō, like our guide through The Cantos, is a wandering poet seeking, to quote Yuasa Nobuyuki, “a vision of eternity in the things that are, by their own very nature, destined to perish.”[22] Basil Hall Chamberlain translates Bashō’s poetical maxim Fu-eki ryu-ko as “Unchanging truth in fleeting forms”[23], surely a maxim apt for The Cantos.
Much more remains to be said of the link between renga and The Cantos, requiring much greater knowledge of both than has been presented here. A further look at the fusion of the Troubadour tradition within Pound’s haiku would also be interesting and I think fruitful, particularly looking at Pound’s The Spirit of Romance translations. Nevertheless, some effort has been made here to point, perhaps ham-fistedly, at the genius of Pound’s ingathering of texts.
Referring to Pound’s “partial rejection of Western civilization, which he found distasteful”, Guiyou Huang suggests that Pound struggles with these two deep and divergent sources, believing that “The East-West clash inside his mind must have been painful”. Huang goes on to say, “but birth without pain is a myth.”[24] Yet in truth, the fusion seems painless: Pound manages to operate Japanese and Greco-Roman culture (and its descendents) in tandem. Both seem in dialogue with each other, complementing and completing each other throughout Pound’s work. Regardless of which title fits him most (a fascist propagandist, the centre of modernism, or the finer craftsman), Pound most obviously was a veracious omnivore, consuming many cultures, legends, poetic tropes, forms and traditions into the borderless realm that is The Cantos.
Word Count: 3684 Bibliography
Works Cited
Albright, Daniel. “Early Cantos I-XLI” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Bashō, Matsuo. The Narrow Road To the Deep North: and other travel sketches. London: Penguin Books, 1966.
Chamberlain, Basil Hall. Japanese Poetry. London: John Murray Publishers, 1911.
Davenport, Guy. “Ezra Pound's Radiant Gists: A Reading of Cantos II and IV”. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 50-64, Spring - Summer, 1962.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. London: Faber and Faber, 1940.
Higginson, William J. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku. London: Kodansha Europe, 1989.
Huang, Guiyou, “EZRA POUND: (MIS) TRANSLATION AND (RE-)CREATION”. Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 22, no. 1-2, pp. 221-30, Spring 1993
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971.
Kearns, George. EZRA POUND: The Cantos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Miner, Earl. “Pound, Haiku and the Image”. The Hudson Review. Vol IX, Number 4, Winter 1956-57.
Nicholls, Peter. “An Experiment with Time: Ezra Pound and the Example of Japanese Noh”. The Modern Language Review, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Jan., 1995), pp. 1-13
Noguchi, Yone. The Spirit of Japanese Poetry. London: J. Murray, 1934.
Porteus, Hugh Gordon. “Ezra Pound and His Chinese Character: a Radical Examination”. Ezra Pound. Ed. Peter Russell. London: Peter Nevill Limited, 1950.
Pound, Ezra The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1968.
------. “Vorticism” The Fortnightly Review, 571 (Sept . 1, 1914), pp. 461-71
------. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London, Faber and Faber, 1998.
------. “In a Station of the Metro”
------. “Alba”
Pratt, William. “Imagism and the Shape of English Poetry.” Homage to Imagism. Ed. William Pratt and Robert Richardson. New York: AMS Press, 1992.
Shioji, Ursula. “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”. Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 22, no. 1-2, pp. 221-30, Spring 1993
Sieburth, Richard. Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy De Gourmont. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Whitman, Walt. “Drum Taps”. Leaves of Grass. London: George G. Harrap and Co, 1920.
Xie, Ming. “Pound as Translator”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Further Works of Influence
Kita, Yoshiko. “Ezra Pound and Haiku: Why Did Imagists Hardly Mention Basho?” Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 179-91, Winter 2000.
Lin, Jyan-Lung. “Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' as a Yugen Haiku.”Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, vol. 21, no. 1-2, pp. 175-83, Spring 1992
Maerhofer Jr, John W. “Towards an Esthetic of Translation: An Examination of Ezra Pound’s Translation Theory.” Paideuma: a Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 29, no. 3, Winter 2000.
Miner, Earl. “Pound, Haiku, and the Image”. Hudson Review, vol. 9, pp. 570-584, 1957.
Terrell, Carroll F. A companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Maine: University of California Press in cooperation with the National Poetry Foundation, 1993.
[1] Eliot. The Waste Land. London: Faber and Faber, 1940.
[2] (p.162) Pound, The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1968.
[3] (p90) Higginson. The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku. London: Kodansha Europe, 1989.
[4] (pp109-11) Noguchi. The Spirit of Japanese Poetry. London: J. Murray, 1934.
[5] (p207) Porteus. “Ezra Pound and His Chinese Character: a Radical Examination”. Ezra Pouns. Ed. Peter Russell. London: Peter Nevill Limited, 1950.
[6] (p463) Pound. “Vorticism” The Fortnightly Review, 571 (Sept . 1, 1914)
[7] (p82-82) Pratt, “Imagism and the Shape of English Poetry.” Homage to Imagism. Ed. William Pratt and Robert Richardson. New York: AMS Press, 1992.
[8] (p184-5) Kenner, The Pound Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971.
[9] (p184) Kenner,. The Pound Era.
[10] Whitman, “Drum Taps”. Leaves of Grass. London: George G. Harrap and Co, 1920.
[11](p57) Davenport, “Ezra Pound's Radiant Gists: A Reading of Cantos II and IV”. Wisconsin Studies in ContemporaryLiterature, Vol. 3, No. 2, Poetry Explication Issue (Spring - Summer, 1962), pp. 50-64
[12] (p67)Albright, “Early Cantos I-XLI” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[13] (p227) Shioji, “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”. Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 22, no. 1-2, pp. 221-30, Spring 1993
[14] (p227) Shioji, “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”.
[15] (p227) Shioji, “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”.
[16] (p227) Shioji, “'Hokku-Like' Elements in Canto IV”.
[17] (pp289-290) Higginson, The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku. London: Kodansha Europe, 1989.
[18] (pp289-290) Higginson, The Haiku Handbook.
[19] (p82) Kearns, EZRA POUND:The Cantos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
[20] (p196) Higginson, The Haiku Handbook.
[21] (p286) Higginson, The Haiku Handbook.
[22] (p37) Yuasa, Nobuyuki. Introduction to Bashō’s The Narrow Road To the Deep North: and other Travel Sketches. London: Penguin Books, 1966.
[23] (p189) Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry. London: John Murray Publishers, 1911.
[24] (p113) Huang, “EZRA POUND: (MIS) TRANSLATION AND (RE-)CREATION”. Paideuma : a journal devoted to Ezra Pound scholarship. vol. 22, no. 1-2, pp. 221-30, Spring 1993
