American haiku: new readings.

'American Haiku' explores the history and development of haiku by American writers, examining individual writers.

In the late 19th century, Japanese poetry influenced through translation the French Symbolist poets, from whom British and American Imagist poets, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T.E.

Hulme, and John Gould Fletcher, received stimulus. Since the first English-language hokku (haiku) written by Yone Noguchi in 1903, one of the Imagist poet Ezra Pound's well-known haiku-like poem, 'In A Station of the Metro,' published in 1913, is most influential on other Imagist and later American haiku poets.

Since the end of World War II many Americans and Canadians tried their hands at writing haiku.

Among them, Richard Wright wrote over 4000 haiku in the final 18 months of his life in exile in France.