Excerpted from Kirkup’s introduction to The Genius of Haiku: readings from R. H. Blyth on poetry, life and Zen. Published by the British Haiku Society.
I first became aware of the works of Blyth in 1952 or 1953, when I held the Gregory Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Leeds. It was also a time when I when I was discovering Chinese and Japanese poetry and philosophy, and reading books on Zen Buddhism that were beginning to proliferate in those days, and to have a certain influence on the Beat poets of America. whom I barely knew, though I had heard of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and the City Lights poets. I was also reading the works of Daisetz Suzliki and Alan Watts, the gurus of the Beat Generation.
I do not know how I came into possession of Blyth’s four books of haiku translations and commentaries, though I do recall I had requested them from Leeds Central Library, whose surly librarian, John Braine, demanded to know what I wanted with ‘such rubbish’ — an attitude to haiku which unfortunately still persists, Certainly Blyth’s books were not available in W.H.Smith’s. I may have picked them up at one of the shops specializing in such arcane forms of poetry outside the British Museum.
Soon I realized that these books are made for inspired dipping. I remember my enchantment on first opening Eastern Culture and finding the beautiful chapter on “Oriental Art and Haiku.” The relationships between poetry and art and poetry and music were subjects that were then occupying my mind, and in this first encounter with Blyth I found many answers to my problems:
The relation of oriental art to haiku is a very deep one. It is direct, in so far as a haiku poet may express his understanding pictorially as well as verbally, and the resultant haiku and haiga sit side by side on the same scrap of paper. It is indirect, in that the pictures he sees teach him how to look at and feel and listen to the world of nature so that he may say in words what the pictures say in lines, concerning that mysterious interplay of the simple and the complicated, the general and the particular.
I who was trying to write poetry about all kinds of painters from all periods — to the general disapproval of ignorant reviewers — found these simple words refreshing and illuminating. I began to look at oriental art with a completely different eye, and a new understanding. But even more delightful to me was the fact that Blyth went on to illustrate his points with references to English painters I knew and loved — Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, Constable, Cozens, Girtin, Moreland, Cotman and Crome. It was only when he had made complete contact with his English reader in this way that Blyth proceeded to introduce Chinese painters of the Tang and Sung periods, showing how in Sessho and Hakuin Zenji there is something in oriental art that does not appear in Japanese poetry until the advent of Basho. Then he quoted Basho’s famous haiku, the first I had read:
On a withered branch,
A crow is perched,
In the autumn evening.
This was a complete picture, an ink-painting in words, with a peculiar visual and literary resonance in its apparently banal words. The resonance came, I realized, from the simple fact that someone had bothered to look at what most people would ignore as a too-obvious, ordinary scene from daily life; and to find in the flash of that haiku glance an unforgettable image.
I kept on dipping into my four books, generously illustrated by poem paintings and painted poems, and I was absolutely entranced. The enchantment came from my apprehension that I was in the presence of a deeply cultivated mind that yet bore its remarkable learning very lightly, did not show off its scholarship, but really treated his subject with affectionate familiarity not devoid of a quirky wit. I could hear the man’s voice coming to me from the printed page, a voice both bluff and quiet, commonsensical yet eloquent, plain yet musical.
Later in my dippings, I was to discover that Blyth used the same technique in analyzing haiku, first comparing examples of that difficult art with familiar English poems, with passages from the Bible, with classical epigrams, with sentences from the great philosophers. I realized that while I was learning about haiku I was also taking in a great deal of knowledge about literature and philosophy — not only English, but also Chinese, Arabic, European and American authors were quoted and compared with what I could see quite clearly were their Japanese equivalents.
Blyth’s books came to represent for me a compendium of Japanese culture. He discusses Noh flower arrangement and the tea ceremony, finding in them an art of living not found in the West: ‘The truth is that the East knows how to live, but does not do it; the West does not know.” He illustrates that revealing aphorism with an unexpected, juxtaposed quotation from D.H. Lawrence, one of his revered authors:
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
There could be no better illustration of the Way of Zen, and through Zen of the Way of Haiku, and Blyth had found it, not in an oriental, but in a fellow Englishman. It is this kind of juxtaposition that constantly surprises and delights us in all Blyth’s works. He pays tribute to the element of contradiction in all human life: we are all Zen Buddhists without knowing it. Blyth points out, in his marvelous little chapter on “Contradiction,” that in the Bible and elsewhere, these contradictions are applied to the great problems of human life. As in certain aspects of Zen and in certain haiku. He goes on to illustrate his theme with quotations from the scriptures, from Edward Lear, Blake, Keats, Meister Eckhart, Alice in Wonderland, Matthew Arnold, Traherne, Thoreau, Coleridge, Browning, all mixed up with oriental poems and philosophical sayings, comparing lssa’s Plum blossoms/ My spring/ Is an ecstasy with Browning’s God’s in his Heaven/All’s right with the world.
The truth is not between the two, or an alternation of them; the truth is the very contradiction itself.
True art does not reside in an artificial consistency, and he quotes Emerson’s famous dictum: ‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ He might have added, from another of his best-loved poets, Whitman: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’
Reading R.H. Blyth is a continual voyage of discovery, not only of haiku and world literature in general, but of oneself. He gently strips away our pride, our illusions, our ignorance, and presents the world afresh to us, as if through reading we had sloughed an old skin and rediscovered the innocent curiosity of childhood. Blyth, like all the great poets and painters and he loved, contains continents, but also an infinity of small, undiscovered treasure islands. In this brief account I can only hint at the quality of his writing and the beauty and soaring intelligence of his mind. It is for you, reader, to start dipping into Blyth as I did, letting your fancy guide you through these representative pages of his oeuvre which have now been culled for you so carefully from a vast amount of writing, sometimes uneven in interest, but always individual, eccentric, sensitive, playful, concerned, entertaining and instructive. I wish you, in reading Blyth, the realization I had of the poverty of my own mind, and the joy of finding at last someone who could mend all the gaps in my knowledge of literature, language and life. For to read Blyth is to enjoy that wonderful experience of finding a new ally, and to enter into an enduring friendship.
James Kirkup
Andorra, 1993