The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Paperback or Softback)

The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (1914) is a collection of essays by Yone Noguchi. Although he is widely recognized as a leading poet in English and Japanese of the modernist period, Noguchi was also a dedicated literary critic who advocated for the cross-pollination of national poetries. His essays on the Noh drama and Hokku poems influenced Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and countless other artists from the West.

“Not only the English poetry, but any poetry of any country, is bound to become stale and stupid if it shuts itself up for too long a time; it must sooner or later be rejuvenated and enlivened with some new force.” For Noguchi, it is not only educational to immerse oneself in the art of other cultures, but vital for those cultures to flourish. As a Japanese poet who excelled with a modern, free verse style of English poetry, Noguchi advocated for his contemporaries to attempt a similar radical openness―to possibility, uncertainty, and change. In these brilliant, instructive essays, he provides his understanding of the spiritual, otherworldly nature of Japanese poetry, reflects on the function of silence in the traditional Noh drama, and praises the lyric essence of Hokku poems.

This edition of Yone Noguchi’s The Spirit of Japanese Poetry is a classic of Japanese American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Yone Noguchi (1875-1947) was a Japanese poet, novelist, and critic who wrote in both English and Japanese. Born in Tsushima, he studied the works of Thomas Carlyle and Herbert Spencer at Keio University in Tokyo, where he also practiced Zen and wrote haiku. In 1893, he moved to San Francisco and began working at a newspaper established by Japanese exiles. Under the tutelage of Joaquin Miller, an Oakland-based writer and outdoorsman, Noguchi came into his own as a poet. He published two collections in 1897 before moving to New York via Chicago. In 1901, he published The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, his debut novel. Noguchi soon tired of America, however, and sailed to England where he published a third book of poems and made connections with such writers as William Butler Yeats and Thomas Hardy. Reinvigorated and determined to continue his career, he returned to New York in 1903, but left for Japan the following year following the end of his marriage to journalist and educator Léonie Gilmour, with whom he had a son. As the Russo-Japanese War brought his nation onto the world stage, Noguchi became known as a literary critic for the Japan Times and focused on advising such Western playwrights as Yeats to study the classical Noh drama. He spent the second decade of the century as a prominent international lecturer, mainly in Europe and Britain. In 1920, Noguchi published Japanese Hokkus, a collection of short poems, before turning his attention to Japanese-language verse. As Japan moved closer toward war with the West, Noguchi turned from leftist politics to the nationalism supported by his country’s leaders, straining his relationship with Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore and distancing himself from his former colleagues around the world. In 1945, his home in Tokyo was destroyed in the devastating American firebombing of the city; he died only two years later, having reconnected with his son Isamu.