Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/16

12 We started our country as the land of poetry; our forefathers were poets themselves. They were free as the winds are free. When our modern young poets cry to go back to the age of their forefathers, they think that it is only the way to escape from the so-called literature and gain this poetical strength and beauty; it is their opinion that they find all the Western literary ideals in our Japanese ancient life and poetry. But I often quarrelled with them on the point that the real poetry of any country should be an expression of beauty and truth; we must build, I always insist, our poetry on our own true culture, which we formed through the pain and patience of centuries. It is my own opinion that the true Japanese poetry should be, as I once wrote, a potted tree of a thousand years' growth; our song should be a Japanese teahouse—four mats and a half in all—where we burn the rarest incense which rises to the sky; again our song should be an opal with six colours that shine within.

People who are already familiar with the Japanese poetry would ask me why I did not dwell on our Uta poetry at some length; I confess that my poetical taste desires far more intensity than the Uta poems, whose artificial execution often proves, in my opinion, to be their weakness rather than strength. Besides, they should be treated independently in a separate volume;