Japanese Poetry Quotes

#1. The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.

Lafcadio Hearn

#2. Japanese poetry does what poetry does everywhere: it intensifies and exalts experience.

Kenneth Rexroth

#3. Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

Ryokan

#4. Everyone calls him Blockhead
No one sings his praises
Or takes him to heart ...
That is the kind of person
I want to be

Kenji Miyazawa

#5. But Ruby, my language of choice since NewBagel, was invented by a cheerful Japanese programmer, and it reads like friendly, accessible poetry.

Robin Sloan

#6. Pine trees rise through cloud
soar up into the blue skies,
bush clover spangled with dewdrops
sways in the autumn breeze;
As I dip cold, pure water
at the edge of the stream,
a solitary white crane
comes lolloping my way.

Baisao

#7. Knut, this is Jude. Remember I told you about him? He writes poetry." Knut looked my half-Japanese self up and down. "Haiku?" he guessed. "Gesundheit," I muttered sourly.

J.L. Merrow

#8. Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.

Lafcadio Hearn

#9. Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities

William T. Vollmann

#10. This rootless shifting east and west
I can't suppress a smile myself
but how else can I make
the whole world my home.
If any of my old friends
come around asking
say I'm down at the river
by the Second Fushimi Bridge.

Baisao

#11. Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.

Santoka Taneda

#12. The River Mogami has drowned
Far and deep
Beneath its surging waves
The flaming sun of summer

Matsuo Basho

#13. It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

Lafcadio Hearn

#14. When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

Matsuo Basho

#15. Haiku does not express emotion from the inside out by displaying the mind of a character. Haiku builds the emotional thrust, makes the artistic statement from the outside in, from the physical world to the mind of the reader.

Harley King

#16. I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Robert Morgan

#17. To tell others that
It is a rumor
Will not do.
When your own heart asks
How will you respond?

Gosen Wakashu

#18. I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

Lafcadio Hearn

#19. And they were deeply moved not so much by the poetry as by their sensitivity to poetry; not so much by the genius of the poem as by their wisdom in understanding the poem; not in knowing the poem but in knowing the poem demonstrated the higher side of themselves and of the Japanese spirit -

Richard Flanagan