of his time were contained, Before the powerful mental effort to conceive and elaborate such a work, we can only wonder, fascinated and overwhelmed.
The poems of the great Western poets are more open, fuller of the force of suggestion and can be prolonged to deeper and denser meanings than haiku. That is why the Divina Commedia today still appeals to our anxieties, our yearning for the absolute. There is in all these Western poems, of course, a part which is dated, attached to the temporal or local circumstances surrounding the poet. In haiku everything is alive, because all that is temporal is left out. Here is really the fundamental difference, This explains why Japanese poetry is a contented poetry even when it is sad; the poet is always resigned to his lot be-cause he is serene and knows that misfortune cannot last long in a life so brief, in such, an inconstant world.
All great Western poets, on the contrary, are rebels; unsatisfied with the world, they try to change it, to transform man himself; the greatest ones are those who led a most unhappy life, were persecuted, exiled from their countries, and had their works burnt. Doubt and desperation gnawing at all their certitudes, they were even doubtful about the justification of their own work: Virgil on his deathbed at Brindisium wanted to destroy the manuscript of the Aeneid; Dante hid. the last thirteen cantos of the Divina Commedia inside a wall, where they were discovered after his death only by chance. Gogol burned all the second part of his greatest novel and died in despair, and Kafka wanted to have all the work for which he is famous destroyed. The Japanese poets, however, usually die in peace and follow the tradition of composing a serene poem on their deathbed. These are fundamental differences between East and West: poetry tells in words of the very heart of man.
It is impossible for me to understand why a genius like Basho limited himself to the brevity of haiku. There are reasons which are understandable even for a Westerner—respect for tradition and for the venerated authority of predecessors. It is a fact that absence of subjective feeling eliminated eloquent discourse, and that it is easier to give strong reality to objective things and to atmosphere in an extremely concentrated form. There is a great tendency in the Japanese spirit for elaborating on the small: for example, the netsuke (miniature carved figure), bonsai (dwarf tree), the minute doll, and the sculpture on a grain of rice. But all these should be valid reasons for a poet of a common quality, not for a towering genius. After long meditation on this puzzling problem, I think that the real explanation lies in the fact that the original source of poetry in the Japanese soul flows inwards, and not outwards. Basho kept for himself the beautiful poetic discourse and gave out only the essentials of his deep meditation; thus his haiku are like the koan of Zen meditation. Nobody after Basho can hope to understand the deep thought and vast implications in the marvellous light surrounding his creation.
Whatever the emotive and mental development that a Japanese reader finds in Basho's poetic suggestions, he can be sure that they will never be as rich as those Basho himself imagined, and might have developed and explained, if he had proposed to do it. Nobody would be able to attain the depth and breadth Dante reached by developing his central poetic ideas; fortunately, he did not leave it for the reader to do. On the other hand, we could do very well without Dante's explanations and commentaries on his sonnets and canzone in Vita Nuoua; most of the time they are obvious and redundant. Too much and too little are both far from perfection.10
As this effort of internalization obliged Basho to withhold too great a spiritual energy, he felt the need of some liberation, and so he went wandering on long trips through Japan, finding in the calm beauty of the scenery the image of blissful peace of mind He wrote notes of his travels. These travel notebooks, so rooted in Japanese tradition, are unique in world literature, and are composed both in verse and prose by many poets. This proves that the poetic forms were not wide enough for the poets to liberate all their inspiratory forces; therefore they had to continue their message in prose, which in this case is a mere extension of the poem.
Art is substance as well as form, of course, and both must be fused into a whole. In the West also, form has been carefully worked out, The sonnet has had great lovers, such as Petrarch and Camoëns; and a single, perfect sonnet made Arvers famous. But also in the West, excessive preoccupation with form gave rise to poetic movements which failed on account of their over-elaboration. It happened in the seventeenth century in Spain with Gongora, chiefly with his followers and imitators; in Italy with Marino; in France with the mannerisms of the Hôtel de Rambouillet.
In Japan, the excessive care for form never brought a decadence similar to Gongorism on account of the short and simple form of haiku. Poets could polish it like a jewel, brighten its light, chisel its shape, and reduce it to the pure essence of beauty. Perfection was attained through a harmonious combination of form and substance. The brevity of the poem made possible this difficult balance.
But if there was never a disintegration in form, the haiku and tanka degenerated in repetitions of theme. As we will see, before the time Japan began to breathe the new winds of the West, the poets were reproducing the same images and ideas, with few minor alterations.
THE CONCEPT OF NATURE
The poet, says Rimbaud, must know himself entirely. He searches his soul, suspects it, tempts it, learns it. After having learnt it, he must cultivate it. . . . The Poet becomes clairvoyant through a long, immense, reasoned unruliness of all his senses."
Even for a poet as free and rebellious as Rimbaud, reason takes a predominant place in the poetic creation. Wilhelm Dilthey affirms that the poetic enlightenment of Schiller's imagination comes always from an intense and conscious work. Schiller himself said that the poet "is the one capable of transmitting his own sensible state to an object, so that that object impels us to pass into that same sensible state, which means that it acts vividly on us." Thus the poet concentrates completely on his own powers; even his madness is reasoned. He transfers his poetic state to the objects; he does not dissolve himself into the nature that surrounds him; on the contrary, he absorbs nature into himself to build with it his own poetic world ; he transforms nature by the prodigy of his imagination, the power of imagination by which he creates a world distinct from the normal world.
Paul Valéry writes in Mémoires d'un Poème:
I would prefer to have written a mediocre work with all lucidity than a master-piece in a flash in a state of trance. Because a flash resolves nothing. It brings me nothing that can surprise me. It interests me much more to be able to produce at my will a very small flash than to wait for projecting here and there the great sparks of an uncertain storm.
To realize the complex poetic operations of imagination, let us look to Dryden:
The first happiness of the Poet's imagination, is properly Invention, or finding of the thought; the second is Fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought as the judgement represents it proper to the subject: the third is Elocution, or the Art of clothing and adorning that thought so found and varied, in apt, significant and sounding words. The quickness of the Imagination is seen in the Invention, the fertility in the Fancy, and the accuracy in the Expression.
These few testimonies of Western poets are enough to show that poetry in the West demands a full concentration of the poet, a complete introspective use of all his powers of reason and intuition in order to appropriate the objects of the outside world, and to build with them an inner world of transcending beauty totally transformed.
The concept of nature in Oriental poetry is totally different. Nature is not a physical manifestation of its creator, but something which exists by itself. Nature was not created for man, and is neither benign or hostile to him. In Japanese and Chinese poetry, man's destiny is neither to struggle against nature nor to dominate it as in the West. Man is embraced in the eternal cycle that goes with nature: birth, growth, and decline, death and rebirth. It is this contrast between the mutability and transience of human life on the one hand, and the permanence and eternal renewal of the life of nature on the other that gives much Chinese poetry special poignancy and endows it with
