Writing his first article on poetry in A.R. Orage's magazine the New Age, F. S. Flint seized upon a recently published book of Japanese poetry in translation, Sword and Blossom, and wrote feelingly of the mode of Japanese lyric: "Surely nothing more tenderly beautiful has been produced of late years than this delicate conspiracy of Japanese artist and Japanese poet!" But the translators had managed to fit most of the originals into the standard rhyming quatrains and tercets of English verse, prompting Flint to complain: "I could have wished that the poems in this book had been translated into little dropping rhythms, unrhymed. To the poet who can catch and render, like these Japanese, the brief fragments of his soul's music, the future lies open. The day of the lengthy poem is over--at least, for this troubled age...." The year was 1908, and, as Wallace Martin remarked, these...