Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/31

Rh affected by all European trends and, in fact, may be regarded in effect as forming a part of the modern movement in Western literature. Ezra Pound included a literary club in Tokyo among the four or five fragments he had shored against his ruins and quoted at length the views of Mr. Katsue Kitasono on the relation between imagery and ideoplasty. Kitasono wrote: “Man has thought out to make a heart-shaped space with two right angles,” and Pound commented that this was the “point where the occidental pedlars of imaginary geometries fell down”, indicating that perhaps the Japanese had beaten at their own game their masters in modern literary techniques.

Kitasono otherwise attained some celebrity as a poet of the new style with such verses as

This was not the most modern of the verses produced in the