미국시에서의 일본 하이쿠의 수용: E. E. 커밍스를 중심으로

Abstract

Haiku, imagist poetry, and Cummings’ poetry have a lot in common. They are short and employ some poetic devices such as understatement, implication, and juxtaposition of images. And brevity, imagistic clarity, detachment, and impersonality which are some haiku qualities can be also found in imagist and Cummings’ poetry. As haiku whose images are based on objective things, images of Cummings’ poems are derived from things and their suchness. Haiku and Cummings’ poems focus on things and this aspect makes their images not abstract or disruptive but clear and meaningful. Moreover, without interference from their writers, the poems express themselves. Based on things and their images, they avoid human judgement, analysis, and self-assertion. Haiku obliterate authors or self and self is effaced in Cummings’ poems, too. This self-effacement in these poems leads to an anti-ideological aspect. In the 1950s and 1960s when haiku was popularized in America, haiku-like Cummings’ poems were received as an antidote to American obsession with the self and an excessive emphasis on personality. Most of all, this impersonality in Cummings’ poems is a try to regain true individuality battered by and in ideological controls.