Essays on Haiku

Japan is often referred to in the field of international relations as the Land of the Rising Sun. With its economy being the third largest in the world, suggesting that this country and its inherent culture plays a significant role in the planet and especially in the region would indeed have some merits. The objective of this paper is to focus on Roland Barthes’ book about Japan as an Empire of Signs and the validity of the points he raised about the country, using other works such as that of Sofia Coppola’s lost in Translation, among others. The ...

Introduction

A haiku is a form of poetry that first gained popularity in Japan. The traditional haiku adopted in the English language has borrowed to a great extent the traditional Japanese Haiku. The basic dictionary definition refers to it as a very short poem that involves a three line description of a passing moment in nature. According to scholastic.com, the greatest challenge in coming up with a Haiku is being limited to 17 syllables. Japanese values the poems for their simplicity, depth, openness and lightness. The structural rules for a traditional Haiku is the use of exactly 17 syllables that ...

Robert Hass born in 1941 in San Francisco is a contemporary American poet and has more often been referred to as a California poet; because sometimes his poems tend to have a West Coast based aura and theme. This poet has been recognized as the most celebrated and widely read contemporary English poet. His works don’t only include original writings, but he is also known as a critic and translator for the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and the Japanese haiku experts Issa, Buson and lastly Basho. His translation of Czeslaw Milosz from “Hymn” goes on to say: “There is no ...

Japanese writing uses both Kanji and Kana. Kana includes both Hiragana and Katakana alphabets. A long time ago, there was no alphabet in Japan, so the characters for writing were borrowed from neighboring China. As ancient China was then ruled by the Han (Kan) Dynasty, all the characters were called Kanji and the Chinese writing is called Kanbun. Because kanji has many strokes, it takes a very long time to write and to memorize. Thus, the Japanese invented the Hiragana and Katakana. Women used the Hiragana alphabet in creating their letters and diaries. An example of the literature written in ...

- On “Calamity of PostWar Construction Came From Rejecting History” The article was mostly about the unique ideas of architect Albert Speer when it comes to reconstructing Germany and how city centers of today should be like. The name of the architect is very familiar as his father, who is also his namesake, had been one of Adolf Hitler’s most trusted architects in the time of the Third Reich. His father, who belonged into a working group in the Third Reich, proposed a more dispersed type of construction around Germany as a part of the reconstruction process. It was an ...

“The Tyger” – William Blake

“Haiku” – Matsuo Basho r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r – e.e. cumings Over the centuries human civilization has tended to have an exploitative relationship with nature: we plunder the earth for old, precious stone and minerals; we consume grain and fruit, nuts and berries; we kill wildlife – sometimes for food but also for pleasure. Humankind has also meddled in nature – genetically-modified crops are simply the latest example, since before them skilled horticulturalists have for centuries produced hybrid plants for practical or aesthetic purposes. The popularity of zoos and wildlife parks demonstrates our fascination with the other species that inhabit our world. Poets have ...

The popular group "The Eagles" in their hit song "Hotel California" has a line” . . . some dance to remember, some dance to forget." This to a given extent helps define Matthew Dickman's "Slow Dance" which seeks out an active oblivion of forgetting within a moment of transcendence that is graced with novelty and rareness. The tonality of the poem hints that ghosts past, relationships past, mistakes, repetitions, mundane trivialities need to be forgotten within this "opportunity to dance with really exquisite strangers. (3-4)” Indeed this need is more important than scientific progress, personal resolutions, or empty actions like "to bring the car around ...

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest: "There ...

Summary

Wystan Hugh Auden: Wystan Hugh Auden was born in 1907, in York, England but his parents moved to Birmingham when he was young. Auden was overly intelligent and was transformed by the poetry of Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy Michael Hamburger: Michael Hamburger was a translator, a poet and a critic born in Berlin in 1924. Hamburger has translated the works of very many poets from German to English. William Carlos Williams: William Carlos William was born on the 17th of September, 1883. William was a poet renowned for his collection that include Spring and All (1923), Kora in Hell (1920), ...

I have never read much poetry because it has never been a part of a class before. I find that poetry is a little bit scary because it could be hard to understand what the poet is talking about, kind of like a riddle. If a teacher asked me if I would rather write a short paper about a news article or a poem, I would choose the news article because I understand how news articles are written but I do not know much about poetry.

Even though I do not know much about poetry, I remember once when I was younger a teacher gave us an assignment ...

If you have ever read a haiku, then you know that poetry is a powerful way to compress language into a more concentrated form of expression. In just 17 syllables over three lines, a haiku is supposed to take an image from nature and give it a whimsical message for the reader, which can either be emotionally powerful or just simple in nature. In prose, describing a scene from nature can take several paragraphs – instead, a haiku does the job in fewer syllables than the names for some scientific compounds. Because poets do not have to follow the same rules of grammar and style that writers ...