Kenneth White and the Bird Path Modern B
27th Conference of the Kansai Comparative Literature Association
Momoyama Gakuin University, Osaka
8 June 1991
Kenneth White and the Bird Path: Modern British Poetry and the East-Asian Tradition
David Ewick, Konan University, Kobe
Kenneth White was born in Glasgow, educated at the University of Glasgow, and has
published more than a dozen collections of poems in English, but his work has been
recognised much more in France than in Britain or elsewhere in the Anglophone world.
White’s poems are written originally in English but have appeared mainly in bilingual
editions in Paris, alongside his own translations into French. He has held the chair in
twentieth-century poetry at the Sorbonne and received literary awards among the most
prestigious in France, including the Prix Médicis Étranger and the French Academy’s Grand
Prix du Rayonnement. Le Nouvel Observateur has called him ‘the foremost living English
language poet’. The use of materials deriving from East Asia, particularly Japan, is a
significant feature of White’s work. Some poems incorporate fragments of texts by Japanese
poets or about Japanese subjects, and others draw upon formal or conceptual models traceable
to classical Japanese poetics. This paper, based in part upon the author’s correspondence with
White, will outline the relation of Japan and Japanese materials in White’s work as it appears
in two recent collected editions published in Edinburgh, The Bird Path: Collected Longer
Poems 1964-1988 and Handbook for the Diamond Country: Collected Shorter Poems 19601990.
Momoyama Gakuin University, Osaka
8 June 1991
Kenneth White and the Bird Path: Modern British Poetry and the East-Asian Tradition
David Ewick, Konan University, Kobe
Kenneth White was born in Glasgow, educated at the University of Glasgow, and has
published more than a dozen collections of poems in English, but his work has been
recognised much more in France than in Britain or elsewhere in the Anglophone world.
White’s poems are written originally in English but have appeared mainly in bilingual
editions in Paris, alongside his own translations into French. He has held the chair in
twentieth-century poetry at the Sorbonne and received literary awards among the most
prestigious in France, including the Prix Médicis Étranger and the French Academy’s Grand
Prix du Rayonnement. Le Nouvel Observateur has called him ‘the foremost living English
language poet’. The use of materials deriving from East Asia, particularly Japan, is a
significant feature of White’s work. Some poems incorporate fragments of texts by Japanese
poets or about Japanese subjects, and others draw upon formal or conceptual models traceable
to classical Japanese poetics. This paper, based in part upon the author’s correspondence with
White, will outline the relation of Japan and Japanese materials in White’s work as it appears
in two recent collected editions published in Edinburgh, The Bird Path: Collected Longer
Poems 1964-1988 and Handbook for the Diamond Country: Collected Shorter Poems 19601990.