Reginald Horace Blyth - Blyth and Haiku

Blyth and Haiku

After early imagist interest in haiku the genre drew less attention in English, until after World War II, with the appearance of a number of influential volumes about Japanese haiku.

In 1949, with the publication in Japan of the first volume of Haiku, Blyth's four-volume work, haiku was introduced to the post-war Western world. Blyth produced a series of works on Zen, haiku, senryū, and on other forms of Japanese and Asian literature, the most significant being his Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (1942); his four-volume Haiku series (1949–52), dealing mostly with pre-modern haiku, though including Shiki; and his two-volume History of Haiku (1964). Today he is best known as a major interpreter of haiku to English speakers.

Present-day attitudes to Blyth's work vary: On the one hand, he is appreciated as a populariser of Japanese culture; on the other, his portrayals of haiku and Zen have sometimes been criticized as one-dimensional. Many contemporary Western writers of haiku were introduced to the genre through his works. These include the San Francisco and Beat Generation writers, such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as J.D. Salinger. Many members of the international "haiku community" also got their first views of haiku from Blyth's books, including American author James W. Hackett (born 1929), Eric Amann, William J. Higginson, Anita Virgil, Jane Reichhold, and Lee Gurga. Some noted Blyth's distaste for haiku on more modern themes and his strong bias regarding a direct connection between haiku and Zen, a connection largely ignored by modern Japanese poets. (Bashō, in fact, felt that his devotion to haiku prevented him from realising enlightenment. In addition, many classic Japanese haiku poets, including Chiyo-ni, Buson, and Issa were Pure Land rather than Zen Buddhists.) Blyth also did not view haiku by Japanese women favourably, downplaying their substantial contributions to the genre, especially during the Bashō era and the twentieth century.

Although Blyth did not foresee the appearance of original haiku in languages other than Japanese when he began writing on the topic, and although he founded no school of verse, his works stimulated the writing of haiku in English. At the end of the second volume of his History of Haiku (1964), he remarked that "The latest development in the history of haiku is one which nobody foresaw...the writing of haiku outside Japan, not in the Japanese language." He followed that comment with a number of original verses in English by Hackett with whom Blyth corresponded.