The Narrow Road to the Deep North: And Other Travel Sketches
by Matsuo Basho
Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, United Kingdom, 1966 167 pages
Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise, you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one -- when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmer there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural - if the object and yourself are separate – then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.
(p. 33)
-- quote submitted by Joel M. & Maura S.
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