Witter Bynner on the Imagists
In sending us Apollo Sings, Mr. Bynner remarks that it is more fun, for the moment to take a classic theme and mix it, with a little Whitman, into an anagram of rhyme than to imitate the Japanese and try to found a school. He goes on: “In spite of several lovely attempts, Pound’s chiefly, the rest seeming to me negligible, they’ve not approached the poetess Chiyo’s lines to her dead child:
I wonder how far you have gone today,
Chasing after dragonflies—
or Buson’s
Granted this dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world,
This granted, yet—
I’m ungrateful to look critically toward an attempt to plant in English these little oriental flowers of wonder. If only they would acknowledge the attempt for what it is and not bring it forward with a French name and curious pedantries! Isn’t the old name for this sort of poem Haikai or something of that sort? At any rate, there is a name. I ought to know it. And so ought they.”