poetry was never troubled by Buddhism or Confucianism, I am glad here to venture that the Western poet would be better off by parting from Christianity, social reform, and what not. I think it is time for them to live more of the passive side of Life and Nature, so as to make the meaning of the whole of them perfect and clear, to value the beauty of inaction so as to emphasise action, to think of Death so as to make Life more attractive, although I do not insist upon their conforming themselves, as we Japanese poets, with the stars, flowers, and winds.
We treat poetry, though it may sound too ambitious to the Western mind, from the point of its use of uselessness; it rises, through a mysterious way, to the height of its peculiar worth, where its uselessness turns, lo, to usefulness. When one knows that the things useless are the things most useful under different circumstances (to give one example, a little stone lazy by a stream, which becomes important when you happen to hear its sermon), he will see that the aspect of uselessness in poetry is to be doubly valued since its usefulness is always born from it like the day out of the bosom of night; you cannot call it, I trust, merely a Japanese freakishness or vagary if we appear to you in the matter of poetry to make much ado about nothing. I dare say we have our own attitude toward poetry. I have no quarrel with one who emphasises the
