Robin

Found this on the web thanks to your Imagists reference.
Could be the link,
Roger


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The haiku originated in Japan about six to seven hundred years ago and thus
is one of the world's oldest surviving poetic forms (Henderson 1958).
However, the English-speaking world did not learn of its existence until
after 1868 when Japan opened its shores to the West and envoys from England
started to translate the form (Giroux 1974). A short while later, French
visitors to Japan took up writing haiku and in 1905 published an anthology
of their work in France. Then, in 1910, two anthologies of Japanese
literature in translation were published, one in France and one in England
and both included haiku (Higginson 1985).

While these anthologies created little general interest, they did catch the
attention of a much-heralded group of English and American poets
headquartered in London and in Chicago between 1910 and 1917 who called
themselves the Imagists and who took a special interest in the haiku (Pratt
1963). 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 (along with the classical Greek
lyric and French symbolism of the vers libre type) for what they considered
to be the ideal poem, one "in which the image was not a means but an end:
the image was not a part of the poem; it was the poem" (Pratt 1963, 29).

While the Imagists thought of the haiku as an ideal, none of them quite
managed to ever write a true one. Pound's famous In A Station Of The Metro
is often described as a haiku by persons with only a tenuous knowledge of
the form:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals, on a wet black bough.
                    (Pratt 1963, 50)
Successful as a short poem, it fails as a haiku because only the first line
deals with an immediate experience while the second line involves the memory
of an image that the poet uses overtly as a metaphor. A haiku is a haiku
because all the images it conveys occur simultaneously in a person's present
preceptions of the world. To become a haiku, Pound's poem would have to
indicate that he saw the faces at the same time as he saw the actual petals,
in the flesh, not in memory.

In Ts'ai Chi'h, Pound comes much closer to the spirit of a true haiku:
The petals fall in the fountain,
The orange-colored rose leaves,
Their ochre clings to the stone.
                    (Pratt 1963, 58)
Here he manages to deal only with things perceived in a particular moment,
but fails to achieve the needed brevity which can be defined as a
comfortable breath-length (Yasuda 1957).

W.J. Higginson (1985, 52) considers Autumn Haze by Amy Lowell to be "one of
the best hokku [haiku] by a self-styled Imagist":

Is it a dragonfly or a maple leaf
That settles softly down upon the water?
However, this haiku has the same problem as Pound's Ts'ai Chi'h -- it is too
wordy. In sum, while the Imagists saw the haiku as a model for their
aspirations, they wrote pieces that were either too metaphorical or too
wordy and usually both.

After the Imagist movement broke up around 1917 (Pratt 1963), North American
interest in the haiku per se languished for several decades until after
World War II. Scholars such as Higginson (1985) and Thomas Lynch (1989) have
tried to trace the path of the form during this period of more than thirty
years and suggest that a continuing interest in the haiku way of seeing was
kept alive by the work of a few major poets who made their mark during this
time, such as William Carlos Williams (beyond his Imagist days), Wallace
Stevens and Charles Reznikoff.

Williams' 1923 poem The Red Wheelbarrow is most often quoted as evidence:

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens
                    (Williams 1958, 37)
As Lynch (1989, 141) states, "All that keeps this poem from being an
excellent haiku is the opening two lines, which by haiku standards are quite
unnecessary."

To this editorial comment, I would add that the title is also superfluous.
Good haiku do not need titles. The meaning should be apparent from the
actual poems themselves.

Both Higginson and Lynch also single out Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird as proof of the haiku's influence on eminent North
American poets: the first stanza of the thirteen composing the poem is the
most frequently quoted:


Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
                    (Stevens 1971, 20)
As with Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow, only a small change is necessary to
make this a true haiku. As it stands, it lacks the immediacy required in a
haiku, but this can easily be remedied by dropping the verb "was".

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was first published in 1917, during
the last year of the Imagist movement. Thus the poem might simply have been
the young Stevens' lone experiment with haiku-like poetry. But we can find
similar writing in later work such as this stanza from the the 1936 A
Postcard from the Volcano:


At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
                    (Stevens 1971, 127)
Nevertheless, such direct images are rare in the more mature work of Stevens
which is richly metaphorical in the best tradition of Western poetry.

On the other hand, Charles Reznikoff did show a steady kinship with the
haiku way of seeing throughout his long career as Geoffrey O'Brien (1982,
21) points out:


Reznikoff wrote in a variety of forms ... but most typically he employed
brief lyrical forms, often grouping short units into such comfortably loose
sequences as Autobiography: New York and Autobiography: Hollywood, sequences
which do not rise toward a climax or seek an overall symbolic meaning but
rather collect a series of powerful moments related only by their position
in the author's experience.
Here is one of his poems that needs no editing to become a true haiku:


About an excavation
a flock of bright red lanterns
has settled.
                    (O'Brien 1982, 20)
However, most of Reznikoff's work is composed of haiku-like lines imbedded
in longer stanzas. The reader has to pluck them out like brilliantly colored
feathers from a peacock. Here, for instance, are the last two lines from a
five-line stanza:


From the bare twigs
rows of drops like shining buds are hanging.
                    (O'Brien 1982, 20)
Nevertheless, compared to Williams and Stevens, Reznikoff is probably the
strongest strand spanning the years between the Imagists and the the 1950s,
a decade which E.S. Lamb (1979a, 5) describes as the "real beginning of what
may be called the haiku movement in the western world".

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