Page:The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (Noguchi).djvu/27

Rh My Japanese opinion, shaped by hereditary impulse and education, was terribly shattered quite many years ago when Edwin Markham’s The Man with a Hoe made a furore in the American Press. I exclaimed: “What! You say it is poetry? How is it possible?” It appeared to me to be a cry from the Socialist platform rather than a poem; I hope I do not offend the author if I say that it was the American journalist whose mind of curiosity always turns, to use a Japanese expression, to making billows rise from the ground. Putting aside many things, I think I can say that Mr. Markham’s poem has an inexcusable error to the Japanese mind; that is its exaggeration, which, above all, we cannot stand in poetry, and even despise as very bad taste. Before Edwin Markham there was Whittier, who sent out editorial volleys under the guise of poetry; it is not too much to say, I dare think, that An American Anthology by Mr. Stedman, would look certainly better if it were reduced to one hundred pages from its eight hundred; we are bewildered to see so many poet-journalists perfectly jammed in the pages. One cannot act contrary to education; we are more or less the creation of tradition and circumstance. It was the strength of the old Western poets, particularly Americans, that they preached, theorised, and moralised, besides singing in their own days; but when I see that our Japanese