Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
The Use and Disuse of Tradition in Bashō's Haiku and Imagist Poetry
Author(s): Koji Kawamoto
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 709-721
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773197
Accessed: 03-07-2016 23:19 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Duke University Press, Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Poetics Today
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
The Use and Disuse of Tradition in
Basho's Haiku and Imagist Poetry
Koji Kawamoto
Comparative Literature, Tokyo
Abstract Basho's haiku and the poetry of the imagists are the two most prominent
examples of extremely short poetic forms in world literature. Their brevity matters,
for the drastic reduction in space bespeaks the poets' fundamental questioning of
what poetry really is: there is no room to be anything but "poetic." For the imagists, this meant fresh imagery as a means of cognitive exploration. Preoccupied with
"newness," however, they tended to disregard the importance of the "old" as a necessary means to set off novelty, an oversight that led to their eventual demise. Haiku,
on the other hand, is a genre of long standing, firmly rooted in tradition. The key
to its unabated vigor lies in Basho's keen awareness of the utility of the past in
undertaking an avant-garde enterprise, which he summed up in his famous adage
"fueki-ryuko," which can be roughly translated as "permanence and change." My
essay undertakes a detailed and comparative stylistic and semiotic analysis of a few
representative works by Basho and the Imagists, exploring the part tradition plays
in them.
Haiku and imagist poetry have a lot in common, which is hardly surprising
since, as is well known, the former played a vital role in the formation of
the latter. Their common points can be summed up as follows: (1) they are
This is a revised version of the paper read at the symposium "Poetics of Japanese Literature: Midwest Seminar on the Teaching of Japanese Literature," held at Purdue University
on 3 October 1992.
Poetics Today 20:4 (Winter 1999) Copyright ? 1999 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
710 Poetics Today 20:4
both very short; (2) they make full use of what Ezra Pound (1961 [1914]: 89)
calls the technique of "super-position," setting one idea (or word picture)
on top of another; and, finally (3), like most avant-garde works of art, they
are basically "open" in the sense propounded by Umberto Eco (1981: 3)that is, they have "flexibility ... in validating (or at least in not contradicting) the widest possible range of interpretative proposals." This last point
may call for further explanation. Haiku and imagist poetry are both fundamentally innovative in their subversive self-assertion against tradition.
They are nothing if they are not "new" and outr6, and thus they entail the
constant risk of being ambiguous or downright unintelligible. Moreover,
their striking shortness, which actually seems to have been intended to this
very end, adds to their semantic indeterminacy.
Imagist poetry, however, differs from haiku in that it was a short-lived
movement which, despite the enormous influence it exerted on modern
English and American poetry, failed to establish itself as an autonomous
genre. Haiku, by contrast, has flourished for over four hundred years as a
popular genre with its own fixed form and conventions. Millions of people
read and compose it today. What, then, was "wrong" with Imagism? Or,
conversely, what made it possible for a mere verbal fragment of seventeen syllables to be sustained and developed as serious poetry? The answer
lies in haiku's ability to remain highly "intelligible," despite its pursuit of
novelty, and to avoid falling into trivialism as Imagist poetry did. What
made this possible? A comparative analysis of these two types of short
poetry, I think, can shed light on their essential semiotic structures and the
way in which the avant-garde uses and disregards-or "disuses"-tradition. Indeed, their very brevity allows us to scrutinize in full detail the basic
procedure of reading "into" poetry, which might be obscured by disparate
elements in longer poems.
Recent scholarship seems to have narrowly historicized the notion of
"avant-garde," along with its companion concept of the "modern," limiting its application to only a particular time and space. This, I fear, leads
to a neglecting of the avant-garde impulses in a number of ages and tra-
ditions. It is my belief that these crucial and "enduring" aspects of the
avant-garde might be made visible from a broader, comparative perspective. Therefore, I argue in this article for the idea of an avant-garde with no
modernist strings attached or, positively speaking, for a view of the avantgarde conforming to a minimal definition. If we understand "avant-garde"
to refer to any group of writers or artists unorthodox and untraditional in
their approach, we are able to see how the term applies throughout the
history of the haiku, the most popular poetic form in Japan for the past
four centuries.
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Kawamoto * Tradition in Basho's Haiku and Imagist Poetry 711
The haiku's 5-7-5-syllable form, perhaps the shortest in the world, is
identical to the first half of another poetic form, the waka, comprising 57-5 plus 7-7 syllables, which was the standard genre for almost a thousand
years. Since a detailed history is beyond the scope of this paper (see Keene
1976), let me just mention here (1) that the haiku originally developed from
waka, gradually gaining independence and establishing itself as a separate
poetic genre and (2) that its main feature, indeed its very raison d'etre, was
simply its difference from the waka-that is, its flashing divergence from
the traditional genre, not in form but in vocabulary and subject matter.
Haiku means "comic verse," the "comic" referring to that which is indecorous and unpoetic, and therefore unlike waka.
The waka had extremely strict rules and conventions governing its poetic diction, topics, and word associations. Its vocabulary was restricted to
the choicest Japanese words. Thus, familiar loanwords from Chinese and
colloquial and vulgar words were carefully eliminated. Its subjects were
primarily seasonal changes, love (largely unrequited), grief for the dead,
and the loneliness experienced on journeys. Even word associations and
connotations were rigidly controlled: "Autumn evening," for example, was
supposed to elicit a sad and lonely feeling to the exclusion of any other;
"deer" cry mournfully for their mates in autumn and not in any other
season; "mist" comes in spring and "fog" in autumn. Haiku, in a sense,
was a latter-day reaction against the rarefied lyricism of the waka's firmly
established courtly tradition carried out by the rising bourgeoisie and the
warriors-turned-government-officials called samurai from the 16oos onward. The new genre was highly conscious of its "comicality" and boasted
all-inclusiveness in both vocabulary and subject matter: one could use vulgar, foreign, or modish words and could talk about matters as unpoetic as
rice reaping, prostitutes, and lawsuits. Without this antitraditional stancewithout being permanently avant-garde - haiku would have instantly been
swallowed up by the older tradition.
The new genre started as a modest pastime, used for entertainment or
elementary poetic instruction, and enjoyed for the mildly charming incongruity between elegant waka diction and prosaic everyday language. Under
the influence of Matsunaga Teitoku (1571-1653) and his Teimon School, the
haiku gained widespread popularity. In the 167os and 168os, however, it
grew blatantly and radically iconoclastic. Poems of the subsequent Danrin
School were largely characterized by an almost dadaesque subversion of
the elegance and lyricism of traditional waka expression. With seemingly
uncontrolled relish, the Danrin poets interposed absurdly, even scandalously, discordant words and usages into the refined waka context. A poem
by their leader Nishiyama Soin (1605-82) (Kuriyama, Yamashita, and Ma-
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
712 Poetics Today 20:4
tsuo 1972: 84) demonstrates the extreme avant-gardism of haiku prior to
the emergence of the Basho School.
Nagamu to te
hana ni mo itashi
kubi no hone
[Thanks to my gazing,
a pain from the blossoms in
the bone of my neck.]
This is a parody of a waka by the priest Saigyo (1118-90) included in the
royal anthology Shin Kokinshu (1205): "I gazed so long at the blossoms they
became dear to me, and when they fell, leaving me, I was sad." Twisting
the famous old poem, as Donald Keene (1976: 45) points out, Soin created "a moment of plebeian humor." The Danrin School was fated to a
short life, however, because, like any number of radical movements, it soon
lapsed into eccentricity and incoherence.
This problem of intelligibility lies at the heart of the avant-garde, which
is where the great master Basho (1644-94) came in. Having experienced
both the bland Teimon and the extravagant Danrin phases of the genre,
Basho eventually managed, almost single-handedly, to usher in a new
phase in which haiku finally acquired an equal standing to waka as serious
poetry in the grand style. (This feat, I think, is comparable to the vernacular revolution against the Greek and Latin classics achieved by Dante,
Chaucer, and the French Renaissance poets.) Though Basho was adept
at the daring and flippant Danrin style, he steadily developed into what
might be called an avant-garde classicist.
Basho's self-assigned task was twofold: he wanted to be disruptive and
yet remain meaningful. His basic doctrine of fueki ryuko-"permanence
and change" or "unchanging and up-to-date," to borrow Donald Keene's
(1976: 136) translation-expresses his keen awareness of this challenge.
Based on neo-Confucian philosophy, "permanence" refers to the unalterable laws of nature and "change" to the creative energy that suffuses the
universe. In literary terms, the fueki ryuko maxim advocates both a fundamental fidelity to the time-honored poetic tradition (which meant the
established norms of classical waka) and a simultaneous commitment to
keeping abreast of the times. The avant-garde in literature, however sub-
versive, cannot avoid dealing with the past. By its own nature, it has to
use tradition in two ways. First, the avant-garde has to flaunt its newness,
its sheer difference from the old: it needs tradition as a foil. Nothing is
absolutely new: something is new only in comparison with something else
already in existence. Just as any realism depends for its effect on its implicit
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Kawamoto * Tradition in Basho's Haiku and Imagist Poetry 713
contrast with the worn-out clich6 of an older realism, as Roman Jakobson
(1987: 20) points out, the avant-garde needs the arriere-garde as its necessary
correlative. Second, the literary avant-garde is compelled, consciously or
unconsciously, to incorporate tradition in a more fundamental way. It uses
words, and words are nothing but conventions with their own accepted
meanings and familiar associations. Even newly coined words and images
turn out to be mere assemblages of bits and ends of their predecessors, not
unlike monsters in myths and science fiction stories which are composed of
parts of well-known creatures. Language is essentially traditional, and one
cannot truly "make it new" without knowing how to make use of the past.
Basho's haiku, notwithstanding their bold innovation, are not as "open"
as they look: each takes the reader on a poetic detour which furnishes clues
to its plausible significance. These clues are not definitive, of course, yet
they are specific enough to exclude whimsical interpretation. In light of
this, it is best to modify Eco's definition of "openness" so that it may hold
true for haiku: it validates not "the widest possible range of interpretative
proposals," but "the handful of plausible interpretative proposals." Take,
for instance, Basho's haiku:
Yamazato wa
manzai ososhi
ume no hana
[In this mountain village,
manzai dancers are late -
plum blossoms.]
(Imoto, Hori, and Muramatsu 1972: 215)
Manzai dancers are a pair of itinerant comedians who sing and dance at
every door to celebrate the New Year season. Here in a village deep in the
mountains, the narrator says, even the indispensable manzai dancers are
terribly late in making their appearance: plum trees are in full blossom
now. What does this mean?
In my view, Basho's haiku is composed of two parts: "base section"
and "superposed section." The base section is a verbal segment carrying a noticeable stylistic interest, a hitch or anomaly in the flow of words
which prompts the reader to search behind them for their hidden meaning.
The superposed section, on the other hand, is normally a briefer segment
which, in conjunction with the base section, gives the reader an indirect
orientation to the plausible significance(s) of the entire piece. Given the
extreme shortness of the poem, the stylistic interest or hitch cannot but
consist of the most elementary of rhetorical devices: oxymoron and hyperbole. I use these terms in their widest senses, "oxymoron" covering a whole
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
714 Poetics Today 20:4
range of meanings from contradiction to opposition to contrast, and "hy-
perbole" including various modes of exaggeration such as emphasis and
repetition. The same dichotomy between oxymoron and hyperbole works
when the reader looks for clues to meanings. Words and images either repeat the same thing or contradict each other; this is a binomial yes-or-no
choice that mirrors the structure of a computer.
In the case of the manzai poem, the segment "In this mountain village, manzai dancers are late" is the base section and the phrase "plum
blossoms" is the superposed section. The anomaly in the base section is
the incongruity in stylistic level between "mountain village" and "manzai." "Mountain village" (yamazato in Japanese) is a poetic word of long
standing that calls up countless classical waka masterpieces on the same
theme. In the heavily codified realm of traditional poetry, as I mentioned,
waka's select poetic words each carried a cluster of fixed connotations
and prescribed associations. "Cherry blossoms" were to be either impatiently awaited or sorely missed for falling too soon, never to be enjoyed
in their full efflorescence; "passing rain in early winter" (shigure) awakened
thoughts of the transitoriness of things human (including one's love), bring-
ing bitter tears to one's eyes, and so on. Such normative connotations are
termed the "genuine purports" (hon'i) of the poetic word.
Thus, the genuine purport of "mountain village" comprises either the
unbearable loneliness of a life lived in seclusion or the bliss of living at
one's ease away from the madding crowd. In Basho's poem, therefore, this
elegant pairing of peace and loneliness is abruptly disturbed by the prosaic and mundane vulgarity of "manzai." This is the stylistic irregularity
(oxymoron) of the base section. The reader, whose anticipation has been
thwarted in this pleasant manner, will then be led to scrutinize the implied relationship between these two ill-matched terms. The function of
the base section is thus to arouse the reader's attention with a striking stylistic anomaly without giving determinate or foreclosing indications of its
meaning. To understand what it means, the reader must refer to the super-
posed section. Here, for example, it might seem that the narrator is unhappy about his life in those mountain regions, where he cannot even enjoy
a normal New Year season. Is this the case?
The superposed section, "plum blossoms," is also an important poetic
word. Although in later years plum blossoms gave way to cherry blossoms
as "the first of all flowers," they remained a favorite with poets. In the waka
tradition, their fragrance-which floated stealthily toward you, announcing their presence in the dark-was the main association, outweighing the
image of the flowers themselves. In Basho's haiku, this positive, olfactory
appreciation works on the base section, calling up the pleasant, albeit pro-
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Kawamoto * Tradition in Basho's Haiku and Imagist Poetry 715
saic, New Year's Day associations of "manzai," which possess their own
quaint elegance. In other words, there is a semantic concord beneath the
stylistic discrepancy between the two words, and this union of favorable im-
plications directs the reader toward the overall meaning(s). One plausible
interpretation would be that the narrator is quietly enjoying late spring in
the mountains with its blooming plums and manzai dancers who have just
made their appearance.
Besides becoming stylistically matched, the two poetic phrases "moun-
tain village" and "plum blossoms" also forcibly call up, in the context of
something coming late, the memory of yet another waka stereotype. For
besides its connotations of solitude and peace of mind, the term "mountain
village" has another series of related clich6s that concern the tardiness of
spring in those regions: "thawing is late," "bush-warblers [uguisu] are late,"
"cherry blossoms are late," and, of course, "spring is late." Basho's "man-
zai dancers are late" thus parallels the implied "plum blossoms coming
late," revitalizing the association by adding an unexpectedly mundane and
contemporary variant to the age-old cliche.
Nevertheless, one can never construct a single definitive meaning of a
haiku. The above example is just a typical instance of the process by which
a reader first seizes the salient stylistic features of a haiku and then "makes
sense" of it. There are critics, in fact, who insist on a very different reading
of the piece: according to them, the belated blooming of plum blossoms
impresses on the narrator the disheartening fact that manzai dancers have
not come around yet (see, for example, Ogata 1989 [1971]: 190-93). In such
a reading, which is as much warranted as the one described here, the positive and appreciative overtones of"plum blossoms" lack the power to infect
the negative phrase "Manzai dancers are late" with a pleasant reality.
Let us turn at random to another of Basho's famous haiku, which also
possesses a chiefly oxymoronic anomaly as its stylistic feature (the base
sections are placed in angle brackets):
Michinobe no (mukuge wa uma ni kuwarekeri)
[By the roadside, (a rose mallow has been eaten by the horse)]
(Imoto, Hori, and Muramatsu 1972: 75)
A horse naturally eats grass, but when it happens to devour a beautiful tree-
flower, of whichever kind, it is somehow shocking. This is the underlying,
nonintertextual contradiction of the base section. Mukuge (rose mallow),
however, is a staple theme in the classical tradition, carrying implications
of a precarious life. This association stems from Po Chu-i's well-known
couplet: "Even a pine-tree dies after a thousand years; / Even a rose mal-
low has its single day's glory," which was anthologized for recitation in
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
716 Poetics Today 20:4
the Wakan-roeishu (c. 1004-20) and often quoted in Japanese stories and
Noh plays. Certainly, it is doubly shocking to see a short-lived rose mallow, enjoying its single day's glory, unexpectedly falling prey to a horse's
indiscriminate hunger. The superposed section "By the roadside" here fur-
nishes a proper scenic background for both rose mallow and horse, thus
establishing this tragedy of nature as an amusing episode experienced on a
journey on horseback, a lighthearted reminder of the unpredictability and,
above all, the fundamental transitoriness of the things of this world.
Of the haiku with mainly hyperbolic, or exaggerative or repetitive, base
sections, the following pieces of Basho's are obvious cases:
Ara toto (aoba wakaba no hi no hikari)
[How solemn! (green leaves, young leaves, and the rays of the sun)]
(Imoto, Hori, and Muramatsu 1972: 157)
Repetition-"green leaves, young leaves"-is here used to emphasize the
vigorous early-summer green of tree leaves. Normally, of course, this sort
of innocuous reiteration would be utterly inconspicuous. It stands out,
however, as an evident anomaly in the minimal scope of seventeen syllables, where redundancy is most undesirable and outlandish, given the
need for verbal economy. The reverential superposed section "How solemn!" resonates with the glittering "rays of the sun" in the base section to
pose the riddle of the locality of the scene: the Chinese characters for "rays
of the sun" can also be pronounced "nikko," and the haiku's awesome tone
immediately recalls the much revered Shogunal mausoleum at Nikko. No
wonder, then, that the sun shines so bright and plentiful on the tree leaves.
Iza saraba (yukimi ni korobu tokoro made)
[Now, then, (let's go out to enjoy the snow-until I slip and fall)]
(Imoto, Hori, and Muramatsu 1972: 123)
Here, the narrator pokes fun at his own exaggerated devotion to the appreciation of natural beauty which characterizes the traditional waka poets.
As can be seen from the preceding examples, oxymoron in haiku is often
used to contradict, in a refreshing way, the courtly waka poets' elegant ap-
preciation of the transient beauty of all living things, which had grown
stale during nearly ten centuries of use before Basho's time. Hyperbole,
on the other hand, is employed as a humorous exaggeration, a reductio
ad absurdum, of the graceful aestheticism of waka. The "comicality" of
haiku, which Basho and other poets championed as a mark of their identity, consists precisely of such earthy twists. In short, these stylistic features,
despite their renovating and subversive intent, depend heavily on traditional poetic words both for their effect and, more important, for their
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Kawamoto * Tradition in Bash6's Haiku and Imagist Poetry 717
ultimate "meanings," the latter of which are deducible from their preestablished "genuine purports [hon'i]." Poetic words in haiku, therefore, first act
as a foil to the worldly realism of "vulgar" words, and then "poeticize"
them. Set alongside the everyday language of the Edo period (1603-1867),
in other words, poetic diction as incorporated in haiku entices the reader
to review the everyday lives of merchants, artisans, and samurai through
aestheticized eyes, thereby authorizing new subject matter as worthy of
the grand waka tradition. It was Basho's genius that led him to recognize
the importance of combining past and present in this fashion to invest the
mundane and up-to-date with the deep meaning of serious poetry. This
constant revivifying of the cherished tradition, against the ever-increasing
pressure of automatism exerted by and through time, is the meaning of his
doctrine of "permanence and change."
II
Imagism has inherited its bent toward openness from French symbolism,
Japanese haiku, and classical Chinese poetry. It owes its extreme shortness and suggestive laconism mainly to the latter two, and the idea of
superposition to haiku and Chinese written characters. The very fact that
a verbal construct of just two or three lines could function as a piece of
serious poetry came as a revelation to the imagists since, apart from songs
and epigrams, the shortest "serious" traditional form with which they were
familiar was the sonnet.
The imagist venture sought to find a new poetic idiom that would better
suit the modern situation, particularly in view of the gap between language
and experience that had been widening ever since the wane of high roman-
ticism. Pound's (1960 [1918]: 4) definition of the "image" as "that which
presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" reflects the need to regain this lost equilibrium between word and reality,
not by way of abstraction and discursive statement (which only leads one
back to the same old impasse), but by finding adequate metaphors, concrete word pictures for the newly realized reality. For the imagists, "image"
is simply a sort of metaphor whose tenor is unnameable, having never been
enunciated before in abstract terms. Rightly, therefore, it should be called a
symbol. In his "Petals on a wet, black bough" ("In a Station of the Metro"),
Pound (1961 [1914]: 87) found a way to convey perfectly what the faces in
a crowded Paris subway station had meant to him, "words that seemed to
[him] worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion." The symbol is a word
for the yet unknown and if, as Pound asserts, "The imagistes' images have a
variable significance like the signs, a, b, and x in algebra" (84), their poems
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
718 Poetics Today 20:4
should by definition be open to all kinds of interpretations. H. D.'s poem
"Oread" is another example of such ambiguity:
Whirl up, seaWhirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pool of fir.
(Jones 1972: 62)
This poem is deliberately constructed in such a way that the reader can
never be sure whether it describes the sea in terms of a pine forest, or vice
versa, or refers to something more subjective.
Still, the problem with imagist poetry is that in most cases it is paradoxi-
cally not open enough. Keenly conscious of the form's brevity and, hence,
of the risk they ran of being too incomprehensible, imagist poets tended to
pick up only small themes simple enough to be practically self-explanatory.
T. E. Hulme's famous "Autumn" conveys the exact impression of "A touch
of cold in the Autumn night" (ibid.: 48); yet, although its likening of the
moon and stars to a red-faced farmer and white-faced town children is
apt and fresh, the poem does not leave much room for interpretative con-
jecture. Or take, as a further example, Pound's own "Fan-Piece, for Her
Imperial Lord":
O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
(95)
In its conciseness and intensity, this is far superior to its source, Giles's
high-flown Victorian translation of a Chinese poem; not much thought is
required, however, to determine that it is a complaint voiced by an abandoned mistress. As Pound himself says in "Chinese Poetry" (To-Day, April
1918) of his "The Jewel-Stairs' Grievance," the translation of a Chinese
poem in exactly the same vein, "we find everything there, not merely by
'suggestion' but by a sort of mathematical process of reduction.... You can
play Conan Doyle if you like" (cited in Brooker 1979: 139). He is perfectly
right here. While granting that the large white margins surrounding the
three short lines do intensify the overall effect, however, we must recognize
that Sherlock Holmes has little to do with "an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time."
Even when the poems are sufficiently open, as are Pound's "Metro" piece
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Kawamoto * Tradition in Basho's Haiku and Imagist Poetry 719
and H. D.'s "Oread," their themes are too limited to warrant Pound's (1960
[1918]: 4) vaunted "image which gives that sudden sense of liberation ...
that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the
greatest work of art." For all their lofty assertions, the imagists' poetry
smacks of triviality, which perhaps explains why it hasn't really sustained
interest over time. Perhaps this was inevitable since, despite their keen
interest in East Asian poetry, imagist poets were unable to actually draw
on the specific cultural conditions that made haiku possible.
The English and American imagists, despite all their insights into the
fundamental newness and openness of haiku and the "superpositional"
principle essential to it, lacked a full awareness of the associative power of
poetic words. They rightly emphasized the "direct treatment of the 'thing'
whether subjective or objective" (Pound 1960 [1918]: 3). Yet the "thing
itself" has a name, and the names have associations. Pound and his com-
pany, in their zeal for making it new, may have been too suspicious of sentimental romantic overtones to admit this simple fact. Pound's (1961 [1914]:
84) comment on the French symbolists' use of symbols, for example, reads
exactly like an attack on the Japanese poets' use of poetic words: "The
symbolists dealt in 'association,' that is, in a sort of allusion, almost of alle-
gory. They degraded a symbol to the status of a word.... The symbolists'
symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic." Leaving aside the
question of whether or not the values of the symbolists' symbols were as
exact as Pound asserts, he seems to be oblivious to the fact that the imagists
also drew on the romantic connotations of words in their presentation of
the "thing itself."
A dead giveaway of this essential fact is their curious predilection for
the moon as a poetic subject. When Hulme compares the moon to the red,
healthy-looking face of a farmer leaning over a hedge, for example, we
experience a shock of recognition precisely because this image stands in
sharp contrast with the conventional image of the full moon, pale-white,
cold and aloof, and high up in the sky. The same thing can be said about
Richard Aldington's "Evening":
The chimneys, rank on rank,
Cut the clear sky;
The moon,
With a rag of gauze about her loins
Poses among them, an awkward VenusAnd here am I looking wantonly at her
Over the kitchen sink.
(Jones 1972: 58)
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
720 Poetics Today 20:4
Here the "comic" denigration or "depoeticization" of the moon is achieved,
first, by deliberately confusing Diana, the chaste goddess of the moon, with
Venus, the goddess of beauty and love, then by transforming the latter
into the charming but vulgar figure of a cheap wanton. Far from treating "things as they are," the poet uses two Greek and Roman goddesses as
familiar clich6s whose fixed associations must be reconsidered. The crucial
point made in these poems is, to quote Hulme's "Above the Dock," which
envisions the moon as a ball abandoned after play: "What seemed so far
away / Is but . ." (48). This is exactly the way the haiku poets made use
of poetic cliches to present their own "thing."
The imagists were on the horns of a painful dilemma. They wanted to
"open up" their poetry; yet the fear of being inconclusive forced them unconsciously to turn to "association" for help. Some sort of allusion, it would
seem, is indispensable for density in a short poem. Yet it is important not to
forget the enormously different cultural contexts in which these two types
of poems-haiku and imagist-were produced and consumed. Referring
to modern poetry's "increasing tendency to use literary allusion as one of
its principle elements," Arthur Waley (1925) points out that it partially de-
rived from "the example of China and Japan, where it has always been
realized that, a civilized mind being as full of impressions and images derived from books as of those derived from life, the poet who banishes such
impressions from his art is fatally impoverishing it." To exploit literary
allusions successfully, however, "certain rather unusual social conditions
must exist," such as "the existence of a public with a common education,
comprising the study of a restricted classical repertory" (ibid.). Though
something of the sort used to exist in England, Waley goes on to say, with
"Virgil, Horace, Ovid and a few other Romantic poets" forming the com-
monly shared canon, "the diversity of modern studies . . . has long ago
swept all this away" (ibid.). This is why T. S. Eliot, in his attempt to use "the
great writers of all nations-Shakespeare, Dryden, Dante, Baudelaireas his classical stock-in-trade" (ibid.), found himself obliged to append a
commentary to The Waste Land. Certainly, the modernists in the West were
in a difficult situation.
According to Waley (1925), the necessary conditions for a successful use
of allusion in poetry-"a common classical repertory . . . further hedged
in by a vast number of arbitrary conventions and restrictions" -no longer
existed in China and Japan at the time of his writing. I grant that the
Japanese have indeed lost many of their ties with the classical tradition in
the wake of the overwhelming influence of Western culture. Nevertheless,
some of their basic attitudes and feelings about the key themes of classical poetry-heartbreak following unrequited love, the dreamlike vanity of
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Kawamoto * Tradition in Basho's Haiku and Imagist Poetry 721
life, and, above all, the changes of seasons-have remained more or less
intact. One positive proof of this is the great number and variety of saijiki
(poetic calendars) on sale at all bookstores in Japan. These dictionary-like
handbooks for haiku poets, both amateur and professional, enumerate the
season-words with all their fixed connotations and give examples of famous
haiku that used them.
Thus, we can see that the imagists used the openness of the short form
primarily as a means of exploration, despite all the problems involved.
Their inventive technique of "super-position," by using bold metaphors to
give concrete shape to fresh perceptions of reality, allowed them to chal-
lenge all existing methods of analysis and description. The openness of
haiku, however, leads to no such total refurbishing of established worldviews. In haiku, one is permitted to play freely with indeterminacy, secure
in the knowledge that, sooner or later, any poem can be reduced to topics
sanctioned by centuries of tradition.
References
Brooker, Peter
1979 A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (London: Faber).
Eco, Umberto
1981 The Role of the Reader (London: Hutchinson)
Imoto, Noichi, Hori Nobuo, and Muramatsu Tomotsugu, eds.
1972 Jihon koten bungaku zenshu 41: Matsuo Basho shu (Tokyo: Shogakukan).
Jakobson, Roman
1987 "On Realism in Art," translated by Karol Magassy, in Language and Literature, edited
by Krystyna Pomolska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Jones, Peter, ed.
1972 Imagist Poetry (New York: Penguin).
Keene, Donald
1976 World within IWalls (New York: Grove).
Kuriyama, Riichi, Yamashita Kazumi, and Matsuo Yasuaki, eds.
1972 Nihon koten bungaku zenshu 42: Kinsei haiku haibun shu (Tokyo: Shogakukan).
Ogata, Tsutomu
1989 [1971] Matsuo Basho (Tokyo: Chikuma-shobo)
Pound, Ezra
1960 [1918] "A Retrospect," in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by Thomas Stearns
Eliot, 3-14 (London: Faber).
1961 [1914] "Vorticism," in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, 81-94 (New York: New Directions).
Waley, Arthur
1925 "Allusion as an Element in Poetry," New Statesman, 22 August.
This content downloaded from 199.16.253.239 on Sun, 03 Jul 2016 23:19:25 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms