Page:Fifteen Poets of Modern Japan - A Book of Translations (1928).pdf/8

8 of poetry is based chiefly on a familiarity with minute hokku and slightly longer tanka.

The rapidly-spreading knowledge of the fundamental characteristics of Japanese poetry would seem to make unnecessary another expository essay in that field. The spontaneity, the simplicity, the mental ingenuity, the charmingly impressionistic pictorialism which we have come to expect from Japanese poets are all exemplified once again in the present collection. It is a pleasure to bring to Western shores such charmingly wrought gifts as these—even though they may have been marred somewhat in their long journey from the East. —G. H.