https://akitahaiku.com/2010/01/16/haiku-about-new-year-2010-part-2/
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How Haiku Came to the West Around 1868 is when the Japanese opened their ports to foreigners. This suddenly allowed for the burst in cultural diffusion and suddenly many ideas were being transported across the seas. This included various forms of art and theater. Among these new found ideas was the spread of haiku to Western civilizations. In about 1905, French visitors took haiku from Japan and published it as a manuscript. A few years later in 1910 the book was translated into 2 copies (1 in French and 1 into English). Shortly after, a group of Americans that called themselves the "Imagists" started to take interest in this form of haiku, which started the Imagism movement. To these Imagists, it was a divine form of poetry and “Its members, among whom were such luminaries as James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, used the haiku as a model.” However, even though they loved this form of poetry, very few of the Imagists ever were able to write haiku poems correctly. Although it did inspire many future poets and helped make haiku popular in the west.
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Ezra Pound |
Among the most famous haiku poets was Ezra Pound. His main source of work was derived from Imagism which is a English poem derived from Japanese (and sometimes Chinese) origins. His style was “stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” In his midlife he started to travel the world and this is about the time when he started to become interested with Japanese works.
His poetry was very inspiring and he became one of the most famous American Haiku scholars of all time. Unfortunately though, as he got older he became interested in many fascist politics and when returning to America after a long period in Italy, he was declared mentally ill. He was awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry for his incredible poetic achievements even though he was in an unfortunate mental state. |
Ezra Pound's Work |
The apparition of these faces in the crowd: The petals fall in the fountain, Petals on a wet, black bough. the orange-coloured rose leaves, their ochre clings to the stone. |