Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/20

16 that there are books and books of "poems" in which one cannot find any particular design of their authors; it is never too much to say that they have a good intention, though not wise at best; but, after all, to have only that good intention is not the way to make art or literature advance.

I always insist that the written poems, even when they are said to be good, are only the second best, as the very best poems are left unwritten or sung in silence. It is my opinion that the real test for poets is how far they resist their impulse to utterance, or, in another word, to the publication of their own work—not how much they have written, but how much they have destroyed. To live poetry is the main thing, and the question of the poems written or published is indeed secondary; from such a reason I regard our Basho Matsuwo, the seventeen-syllable Hokku poet of three hundred and fifty years ago, as great, while the work credited to his wonderful name could be printed in less than one hundred pages of any ordinary size. And it is from the same reason that I pay an equal reverence to StephaneStéphane [sic] Mallarmé, the so-called French symbolist, though I do not know the exact meaning of that term. While they are poets different in nature, true to say, as different as a Japanese from a Frenchman (or it might be said, as same as the French and the Japanese), it seems to