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Rather than resist the vast social and cultural changes sweeping Japan in the nineteenth century, the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) instead incorporated new Western influences into his country’s native haiku and tanka verse. By reinvigorating these traditional forms, Shiki released them from outdated conventions and made them more responsive to newer trends in artistic expression. Altogether, his reforms made the haiku Japan’s most influential modern cultural export. Using readings of Shiki’s own writings and accounts of the poet by his contemporaries and family, this book charts Shiki’s revolutionary (and often contradictory) experiments with haiku and tanka, a dynamic process that made the survival of these traditional poetry genres possible in a globalizing world. The book particularly highlights random incidents and encounters in its impressionistic portrait of this tragically young life, moments that elicited significant shifts and discoveries in Shiki’s work. The push and pull of a profoundly changing society is vividly felt in this book’s narrative, which also includes observations of other recognizable characters, such as the famous novelist and critic Natsume Sōseki. In addition, the book reflects the author’s personal relationship with Shiki’s work, further developing the nuanced, deeply felt dimensions of its power.

This book casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers and shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today. The book draws on a diverse range of unconventional sources, including poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives and Hallmark greeting cards. It argues that poetry, in the first half of the twentieth century, was part and parcel of American popular culture, and that it spread rapidly at that time as the consumer economy expanded and companies exploited its profit-making potential. The book also shows how poetry offered ordinary Americans creative, emotional, political and intellectual modes of expression, whether through scrapbooking, participation in radio programs or poetry contests. Re-envisioning the uses of twentieth-century poetry, the book provides the reader with a better understanding of the innovations of modernist and avant-garde poets and the American reading public's sophisticated powers of feeling and perception.