One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English

No other Asian poetic form has so intrigued and beguiled the English-speaking world as the Japanese haiku. Even before World War I such imagist poets as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and John Gould Fletcher were experimenting with the form. At that time, Pound well described the haiku as "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Indeed, it is the haiku's sense of immediacy and its precision that continue to appeal to poets and poetry lovers today.

In recent decades there has ...