I admit that they will appear first, at once, to you to be the vagrant utterances of a primitive man who, uneducated, sings of whatever his fancy or whim finds fair and striking. But I should like to ask what poet is not primitive in heart when he is true. The real poet in the Japanese understanding is primitive, as primitive are the moon and flowers; the voice of a wind we hear to-day is the same voice which echoed, let me say, to the ears of Adam and Eve through the valley and trees. I think it is quite a happy epithet to call the poets the friends of winds and moon. You may think it a pantheism if you will, when our Japanese poets go to Nature to make life more meaningful, sing of flowers and birds to make humanity more intensive; it was from the sense of mystical affinity between the life of Nature and the life of man, between the beauty of flowers and the beauty of love, that I wrote as follows:
“It’s accident to exist as a flower or a poet;
A mere twist of evolution but from the same force:
I see no form in them but only beauty in evidence;
It’s the single touch of their imagination to get the embodiment of a poet or a flower:
To be a poet is to be a flower,
To be the dancer is to make the singer sing.”
Basho, the most famous Hokku poet of the seventeenth century, in fact, the real creator of the seventeen-syllable form of poetry, spent the
