Japanese poetry and the legacies of war

To consider the poetics of war or the aesthetic dimension of literature composed during wartime or written to advocate war is a difficult and demanding task. The same difficulty applies equally to poetry written in the immediate post-war period as such verse is as much a response to the war as anything else. Consideration of these issues naturally raises ethical or moral issues, as ethics and morality become part of the evaluative criteria that pass judgment on works produced during wartime and also in the post-war era. Many literary critics have argued that the intellectual or artist must be faithful to the truth. George Steiner has written: ‘No city, no nation, no loyalty is worth a lie.’ ¹ Tim Redman in his 1991 book on Ezra Pound and fascism cites these lines in support of the proposition that Pound firmly believed in the lies of fascism, which brings into doubt the notion of truth as a sufficient standard to evaluate art, but only if we equate truth with belief. ² If belief is insufficient to the truth, then, can we pass judgment on war literature? Here, I think, moral critique can shift to an aesthetic mode and critique literature for failing to express the truth.