Michael Edwards

I recently acquired a second-hand copy of dust devils: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku (Red Moon Press, 2017), from Carson Books in Vancouver. An essay included in the anthology, by Susan Antolin, entitled “Haiku Aesthetics: A Look at Understatement,” caught my attention. In the essay she quotes Eliot and Williams. Antolin makes the argument that, in haiku, mood and emotion arise from imagery. The ‘haiku aesthetic’ she names and defines, is one of understatement, and is not at all separate from an aesthetic that is common throughout much of contemporary English-language lyric poetry. She explores this idea and other related elements of haiku in more depth. This is an essay serves as a good primer to the form of haiku.

” … [T]he most fundamental element of traditional haiku is the image. The use of specific images from everyday life is an inherently understated way to create a certain mood or convey some larger feeling. T.S. Eliot wrote that: ‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.’ William Carlos Williams famously spoke of ‘no ideas but in things.’ Haiku fits exactly into this line of thought. With specific imagery and no space for exploration, understatement is nearly inevitable.”

(Susan Antolin’s essay, ‘Haiku Aesthetics: A Look at Understatement’)