Sadakichi Hartmann - Drifting Flowers & Other Verses

Sadakichi Hartmann - Drifting Flowers & Other VersesPublic Domain Poets #10 | Publicdomainpoets.comContaining Sadakichi Hartmann's 'Tanka & Haikai: Japanese Rhythms' (1915); selections from 'My Rubaiyat' (1913) and the earlier 'Drifting Flowers of the Sea' (1904); and the essays 'Why I Publish My Own Books' (1915) and 'The Japanese Conception of Poetry' (1904). New edition designed edited and selected by Dick Whyte. If pleasures be mineAs aeons and aeons roll byWhy should I repineThat under some future skyI may live as a butterfly.Hartmann (1867-1944) was born on the island of Dejima off the coast of Nagasaki to a Japanese mother and German father. His mother died giving birth to his brother and they were sent to Germany to live with relatives. Hartmann later ran away to Paris was disinherited by his father and sent to Philadelphia to live with an uncle. It was there he self-published his first dramatic works and a book of conversations with Walt Whitman.White petals afloatOn a winding woodland stream-What else is life's dream?In the 1900s Hartmann started writing poetry drawing influence from Whitman French symbolism and Japanese poetics and in 1904 he published the earliest known set of English-language tanka alongside a short essay on tanka and haiku aesthetics. In the 1910s he followed this up with a collection of linked tanka-esque blank-verse inspired by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and befriended writers like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Hartmann's 'Japanese Rhythms' (1916) remains one of the earliest published collections devoted to English-language tanka and haikai followed by Noguchi's 'Japanese Hokkus' (1920) and Jun Fujita's 'Tanka: Poems in Exile' (1923).Public Domain Press is dedicated to producing contemporary editions of out-of-print poets and poetry collections particularly with regard to compressed and fragmented 'free verse' from the late-1800s and early-1900s. All poems start as facsimiles - to preserve the original fonts - which are then cleaned up edited for consistency and spaciously laid-out adorned with borders illustrations and ornaments from the books and magazines they originally appeared in. These are not reprints of previously existing books but newly crafted collection lovingly edited from public domain material for the serious poetry lover.