ThursdayMay 21, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he's a high-handed old poem himself, but he's also sublime and who goes to poetry for safety anyway.
Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth's four volume Haiku became especially popular at this time [1950's] because his translations were based on the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen.
Regarding R. H. Blyth: For translations, the best books are still those by R. H. Blyth....
Regarding R. H. Blyth: The first book in English based on the saijiki is R. H. Blyth's Haiku, published in four volumes from 1949 to 1952. After the first, background volume, the remaining three consist of a collection of Japanese haiku with translations, all organized by season, and within the seasons by traditional categories and about three hundred seasonal topics.
Regarding R. H. Blyth: Two men who may be called pillars of the Western haiku movement, Harold G. Henderson and R. H. Blyth....
Art is frozen Zen
A haiku is the expression of a temporary enlightenment, in which we see into the life of things.
It is not merely the brevity by which the haiku isolates a particular group of phenomena from all the rest; nor its suggestiveness, through which it reveals a whole world of experience. It is not only in its remarkable use of the season word, by which it gives us a feeling of a quarter of the year; nor its faint all-pervading humour. Its peculiar quality is its self-effacing, self-annihilative nature, by which it enables us, more than any other form of literature, to grasp the thing-in-itself.
The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things.... When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.
Thus we see that the all important thing is not killing or giving life, drinking or not drinking, living in the town or the country, being unlucky or lucky, winning or losing. It is how we win, how we lose, how we live or die, finally, how we choose.
If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.
Or, to express this in another way, suggested to me by Professor Suzuki, in connection with 'seeing into our own nature, poetry is the something that we see, but the seeing and the something are one; without the seeing there is no something, no something, no seeing. There is neither discovery nor creation: only the perfect, indivisible experience.
These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.
The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.
Nothing divides one so much as thought.
The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.
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