Haiku Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashô to Shiki" by Harold G. Henderson was published by Doubleday Anchor Books. This book was a revision of Henderson's earlier book titled "The Bamboo Broom" (Houghton Mifflin, 1934). After World War II, Henderson and Blyth worked for the American Occupation in Japan and for the Imperial Household, respectively, and their shared appreciation of haiku helped form a bond between the two. Henderson translated every hokku and haiku into a rhymed tercet (a-b-a), whereas the Japanese originals never used rhyme. Unlike Yasuda, however, he recognized that 17 syllables in English are generally longer than
Japanese poetry even today in the "haiku" tradition. The Japanese preface by Ki no Tsurayuki is also the beginning of Japanese criticism as distinct from the far more prevalent Chinese poetics in the literary circles of its day. (The anthology also included a traditional Chinese preface authored by Ki no Tomonori.) The idea of including old as well as new poems was another important innovation, one which was widely adopted in later works, both in prose and verse. The poems of the "Kokin Wakashū" were ordered temporally; the love poems, for instance, depict the progression and fluctuations of a courtly love-affair. This