El Haiku en la poesía americana contemporánea

Resumo

El Haiku en la poesía Americana contemporánea In the third centenary of the greatest of all Japanese haiku poets, Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), and half a century after the end of the war between Japan and the U.S.A., it appropriate to write about haiku and American poetry. Haiku, the quintessence of Japanese poetry, fascinated a good number of American poets since the times of Ezra Pound and the Imagists. But its essence was better known to the Americans after the great cultural exchanges which took place between the two countries after World War II, in the last 50 years. Starting in California the interest for Japanese poetry and particularly for haiku spread through the whole country from the Pacific to the Atlantic, following in a way the footsteps of Jack Kerouak and his Trip-Trap: Haiku along the Road from San Francisco to New York (1959). And haiku has been growing ever since in the fertile American soil. A brief reference and description is given of a few representative haiku books, eighteen in all, written by American poets, which have a peculiarity in common: all of them are haiku collections organized with an explicit reference to the cyclical changes of nature represented in the four seasons and in a few of them in the months of the year. As a conclusion it can be said that after 50 years of continuous growth haiku has become naturalized in the U.S.A.