SOURCE: "Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism," in Modern Philology, Vol. 90, No. 1, August, 1992, pp. 46-69.

In the following essay, Hakutani discusses the impact of Noguchi's work on Ezra Pound, with whom Noguchi corresponded on several occasions.

It is commonplace to say that imagism played a crucial role in poetic modernism and that Ezra Pound, more than anyone else, put this poetics to practice in the 1910s. Yet imagism still remains a somewhat cloudy topic. Many discussions content themselves with restatements of Pound's celebrated essay on vorticism, published in September 1914.¹ Even Hugh Kenner, the most eminent critic of Pound, says, "The history of the Imagist Movement is a red herring." He admonishes one "to keep one's eyes on Pound's texts, and avoid generalities about Imagism."²

In that "Vorticism" essay, Pound acknowledged for the first time in his career his indebtedness to the spirit of Japanese poetry in general and...