Preface and Acknowledgements

This bibliography, presented in an earlier manifestation as a PhD thesis at University College London, was conceived of as a logical and necessary step on the way toward a more complete understanding of the ways conceptions of Japanese subjects and forms have affected the development of English-language poetry, and also, to turn the question slightly, the ways English-language poets have affected the development of European and American conceptions of Japanese subjects and forms. The first assumption has been that the writer who would seek to shed light on a literary and cultural landscape as rich as this had better know something of the whole of the terrain, not just the isolated parts of it that have been highlighted before, often repeatedly, and usually without reference to the cultural and historical contexts from within which they have taken shape. The intent has been to establish a mapping of the terrain that is more complete than has existed before.

In its earliest conceptions the work was intended to be comprehensive, that is, to include reference to every text that directly speaks to the ways Japan has been conceived of and drawn upon by poets writing in English. This aim of years ago now seems all but impossibly naive. To be comprehensive how to account for the hundreds of English-language poems of ‘Old Japan’ that appeared in journals and newspapers in Britain and the United States between 1860 and 1910? Or the 1,400 poems indebted to understanding of Japanese poetics in the opening volumes of Cid Corman’s Of? Or, to push the point to its extreme, the dozens of knowledgeable obituaries of Japanese public figures that after 1991 James Kirkup contributed to the Independent?

The inevitable compromise has been to offer a limited completeness. With the exception of a few deliberate omissions noted below, section A, Critical and Comparative Studies, and B, Poets Central to the Study, are as comprehensive as I have been able to make them, while sections C, Other Materials, and D, Sources of Influence and Transmission, offer selected listings from among a much larger number that would have been possible.

Principles of selection have been pedestrian. The writers addressed in section B are those whose incorporation of Japanese materials was in literary and cultural terms most significant among English-language poets active in the first half of the twentieth century, and the choice to focus attention on that half century was taken because it was a time particularly rich in the development of the representational strategies that constitute the textual centre of the study. The materials cited in sections C, D, and E are those that most directly augment the more comprehensive treatment afforded the materials of A and B, and most instrumentally inform the literary and cultural relation implicit in the subtitle of the work, Japan in English-Language Verse.

Lines of demarcation in such matters are not transcendental, and another writer would have drawn them at different attitudes toward the whole than I have. But in such a project it is difficult to make apologies for a scheme of selection and classification that finally has facilitated even a limited completeness. A reader who does not find reference to one thing or another where it is supposed it should be is referred to the search form for help in discovering where it may be found in the universe of this work. Between that form and 43,000 linked cross references my hope is that nothing of instrumental importance will be found missing for long.

Details of the classification system and the various conventions relied upon will become apparent to any reader who spends time with the bibliography, but a few notes may be of use at the beginning. Section A, ‘Critical and Comparative Studies’, is organised chronologically by date of first publication of the works noted; the materials cited are critical works that address the incorporation of Japanese materials in English-language verse but do not focus on one writer in particular. Section B, ‘Poets Central to the Study’, is divided into twelve sub-sections, BA through BL, which correspond to the twelve writers under study in the section, arranged alphabetically by surname; each of these is further divided into sections for primary materials, works by the writer, and secondary materials, works that address the writer’s incorporation of Japanese materials; within these sections the works cited are arranged chronologically by date of first publication.

In selecting materials for inclusion in sections A and B the net has been cast wide. The listings of primary materials in section B include all works I have found in which the writers under study address Japan in any way, or demonstrably owe to understanding of Japanese subjects. And the listings of secondary materials include virtually everything I have found that addresses the incorporation of Japanese subjects or forms in English-language poetry. The only deliberate omissions are works that appeared only in newspapers and unpublished theses presented for degrees below the Doctoral level—though in practice a few of each of these have been found to contribute sufficiently to merit inclusion—and works that focus on the phenomenon usually referred to by the oxymoron ‘English-language haiku’. These are included only when they concern an incorporation of Japanese forms in the work of a major poet or a poet who would be noted here even had he or she not experimented with the possibilities of haiku in English. Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ is noted, for example, and Cantos XVII and XXVI, as are secondary works that call attention to the relation of these to Pound’s understanding of the hokku, but as a general principle collections of and studies about ‘haiku poets’ writing in English have not been included. Reviews of important primary works are included in their proper chronological place in the lists of secondary materials and cross-referenced in the entry for the work under review. Reviews of important critical studies ordinarily are cited in the entry for the work under review, though in a few cases contribute sufficiently to the study or otherwise call enough attention to themselves to merit a separate listing, cross-referenced in the entry for the work reviewed.

Section C, ‘Other Materials’, is divided into three sub-sections. CA, Other Poets and Works, includes short bibliographical essay-annotations, some addressing several writers together and others the pertinent work of a particular writer, which are arranged chronologically according to the date of publication of the earliest work cited. CB, Archives, includes reference to collections of unpublished materials of particular importance to the study, and is arranged alphabetically by the surname of the writer whose papers are discussed. CC, The Larger Context, takes note of critical works that augment this study; arrangement of entries for individual works is chronological according to date of first publication, and two collective entries follow these. And section D, ‘Sources of Influence and Transmission’, provides a series of brief bibliographical essay-annotations about writers and texts that have provided English-language poets with many of their images and understandings of Japanese subjects and forms, with particular attention to sources that inform the work of the writers noted in section B; arrangement is chronological according to the date of first publication of the earliest work discussed. In all sections searches for materials in English and Japanese have been systematic through 2002, and materials in other languages have been noted when they have come to my attention.

Throughout the bibliography entries are numbered according to the section in which they appear, and these section markers and numbers are used in cross-references and indices. Beongcheon Yu’s The Great Circle, for example, the fifty-sixth entry in section A, is referred to throughout the bibliography as A56. To avoid unnecessary repetition cross-references within a section often include only the number and not the section marker, and so, for example, when a reader of section BJ on William Plomer is directed to ‘see also 18’, the reference is to the entry for Plomer’s libretto for Curlew River, item 18 in that section; outside the Plomer section a reference to this work would direct the reader to ‘see also BJ18’. Likewise, in a sequence of cross-references and in the indices when no ambiguity is possible the section header is omitted, thus ‘see also A25, 46, BK59, 88, 126, and 181’ refers the reader to entries 25 and 46 in section A and entries 59, 88, 126, and 181 in section BK.

Most of the items listed are works I have seen. Those that are not are marked with a dagger (†). The bibliographical entries themselves always include reference to the earliest date of publication I am aware of and also, where relevant, to the latest edition or reprint I have seen. Typographical and stylistic conventions have been adapted from the 14th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, and vary notably from those outlined there only in two cases: in citations and annotations the titles of individual poems and plays in verse appear in upper case type; and dates for journal publications by the writers noted in section B include along with the year of publication the month and, if possible, the day. Where the author of a particular work is clear from other information, as in the listings of primary materials in section B, the author’s name is not repeated in the citation itself. Multiple entries generally have been avoided, though if different parts of a work fall into separate categories the parts are listed separately. Shôtaro Oshima’s W. B. Yeats and Japan, for example, includes relevant material both by Yeats and about Yeats, the former noted at BL52 in the listing of primary Yeats materials, the latter at BL124 in the listing of secondary materials. In such cases a cross-reference in each entry directs the reader to the other. Abbreviations are used sparingly and are mainly the conventional ones, UP, TLS, OED, DAI; OCLC refers to the Union Catalogue of the Online Computer Library Center.

Titles of works in Japanese are romanised according to the modified Hepburn system and translated in parentheses following the romanisation; unless otherwise indicated these and other translations are mine. In romanising names from the katakana I have adopted standard spellings, thus, for example, Pound instead of Paundo. In all cases the common but unfortunate practice of referring to the titles of Japanese periodicals by an English translation has been avoided, and throughout the bibliography these are left untranslated, thus Eigo bungaku sekai, which will allow the reader of Japanese to find the work in a library that contains it, and not The World of English Literature, which leaves the reader guessing about a re-translation of the title back to the original.

Ordinarily Japanese names are given in the Japanese order, surname followed by given name, but I have not applied the rule consistently. For some Japanese who are known to English readers the standard European practice has seemed preferable. To avoid confusion, in bibliographical citations and the Index of Names and Subjects standard English conventions are followed, and so the reader in doubt about which name is which is referred to the index, where surname appears first. As a general principle words of Japanese origin that appear in standard English dictionaries are not italicised and diacritical marks are omitted, thus, for example, bushido instead of bushidô, and diacritical marks are likewise omitted in place names well known to English readers, thus Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and a few others, though in titles and direct quotations the spellings and typographical conventions of the source are retained. For the classical Japanese dramatic form I prefer ‘nô’, for example, but in direct quotations and titles the reader may find ‘Noh’, ‘Noh’ ‘Nô’, ‘noh’, ‘Nôh’, and ‘No’. Chinese names and terms generally are transcribed according to the Wade-Giles system, not because I find it preferable to the Pinyin system but for the sake of consistency. Wade-Giles is used by virtually all the writers whose work is under study here, and it has seemed fussy to vary from my sources in such a matter when the project is not directly concerned either with China or the Chinese language.

All items cited in sections A and B and most in sections C and D are annotated. The principle of annotation has varied according to the item, but in general for works cited in the listings of primary materials I have tried to describe as precisely as possible the nature of the relation to Japanese subjects or forms, to account for intertextual and inter-conceptual relations between the work and others related to Japan, and when necessary to explain references to Japanese subjects. The principle for critical works has been to describe relevant premises, assertions, and conclusions, when possible using the writer’s own words, and in many cases to evaluate the work’s usefulness to the study. I have been conscious of tracing the chronology of particular conceptions and forms, and so annotations often take note of where an idea or image or understanding appeared before making its appearance in the work under discussion. In such cases the earlier work is noted in a cross-reference. When the reader is directed to ‘see index’ in an annotation, the reference is to the index of the work under discussion. Unless otherwise indicated page numbers refer to the latest edition or reprint cited. Important names and terms that appear in several annotations are noted in the Appendix of Names and Terms.

This project has been aided by the kindness and support of friends, colleagues, and teachers from several disciplines. I would like to thank in particular Susan Anicad, Florian Coulmas, Dan Dyer, Anna Ford, Dan Jacobson, Frances Kanabe, Daniel Karlin, Dorsey Kleitz, A. Robert Lee, Michael Lewis, Peter Makin, Steven R. Reed, Samuel N. Rosenberg, Paul Rossiter, Modjtaba Sadria, Ayako Saitô, Max Saunders, and Lucien Stryk, and to acknowledge my gratitude to the late John Payne, Shôichi Terashima, and Shigeo Tobita. I am grateful for kind assistance received at the British Library, the University Library at Cambridge, the National Diet Library of Japan, the Chuo University Library, the Japan Foundation Library, the Library at the International House of Japan, the Lilly Library, and the Indiana University Library at Bloomington. Among the greatest pleasures of the work was discussing parts of it with Gary Snyder in Kyoto and Mary de Rachewiltz in Beijing, whose interest meant more to me than they could know. My gratitude also to Zhaoming Qian and Zhang Jian for making possible the discussions that took place in Beijing, and to Patrick Brantlinger, Kenneth Johnston, and Susan Osborne, whose kindness ensured that even in Tokyo I had access to the on-line resources of Bloomington.