Poetry Japanese formal poetry (which was generally referred to as "waka"), and was used more heavily to explore personal rather than public themes. By the tenth century, tanka had become the dominant form of Japanese poetry, to the point where the originally general term "waka" ("Japanese poetry") came to be used exclusively for tanka. Tanka are still widely written today. Haiku is a popular form of unrhymed Japanese poetry, which evolved in the 17th century from the "hokku", or opening verse of a renku. Generally written in a single vertical line, the haiku contains three sections totalling 17 "onji", structured in
Haiku theoretician F. S. Flint, who passed on Couchoud's ideas to other members of the proto-Imagist Poets' Club such as Ezra Pound. Amy Lowell made a trip to London to meet Pound and find out about haiku. She returned to the United States where she worked to interest others in this "new" form. Haiku subsequently had a considerable influence on Imagists in the 1910s, notably Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" of 1913, but, notwithstanding several efforts by Yone Noguchi to explain "the hokku spirit", there was as yet little understanding of the form and its history. R. H. Blyth