Foreword
This inaugural volume of Selected Poems of Daisaku Ikeda is the first of a three-volume compilation of his poems translated into English from the originals in Japanese. Whereas the two forthcoming volumes of Poems will be arranged to highlight specific aesthetic practices and thematic concerns associated with Ikeda’s poems and the audiences to which he has traditionally addressed his thoughts in verse, the contents of this volume, which span the years from 1945 to 2007, are intended to provide readers already familiar with his poetry, as well as those encountering it for the first time, an overview of the subjects to which he has devoted attention through the inspiration, complemented by individual imagination, that flows from his “poetic heart and mind.”1
Because the discourse in which Ikeda has most often addressed the public is either the energetic prose of his books, essays, speeches and lectures, or the very personal prose—sometimes vernacular, but always scholarly yet accessible—with which he has engaged in dialogue with conversational partners and correspondents from around the world, readers new to his poetry will possibly stand amazed at his facility in multiple verse forms and the range of his poetic interests in evidence throughout this volume. Here, readers will find lyrical verses celebrating nature’s splendor through subjects large and small; poems addressed to Ikeda’s fellow citizens of Japan on a wide variety of subjects; poems addressed to the various constituencies of the Soka Gakkai community in Japan as well as in the United States, Italy, Germany, Malaysia and other nations; poems dedicated to mothers and women generally, where Ikeda’s theme is personal empowerment that transcends gender boundaries and the limitations those boundaries erroneously ascribe to women; and poems of personal introduction offered out of respect for world leaders such as Rajiv Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Corazón Aquino with whom it has been Ikeda’s privilege to interact and for authors and artists such as Nataliya Sats, Walt Whitman, Yehudi Menuhin, Oswald Mtshali and Esther Gress, whose poetry, music or educational practices in the arts have served Ikeda as sources of inspiration that piqued his own imagination.2 Now in his eighties, and having spent his years engaged in genuine lifetime learning and public advocacy to improve the human condition—by advancing the cause of world peace, championing the preservation of the natural environment with which humankind was originally blessed and institutionalizing the forms of value-creating education central to the lay Nichiren Buddhist Soka Gakkai organization over which he has presided since 1960—across the poems gathered here Ikeda admirably demonstrates his unwavering commitment to nurturing the development of a humanistic global culture.
A significant feature of this volume is the Translator’s Note, which fully describes the process whereby the fifty poems that follow have been translated from Japanese into English. Although some of these poems were previously translated from Japanese and published in English by the scholars of East Asian literature Burton Watson and Robert Charles Epp, final translations of all poems printed in this volume, including those few by Watson and Epp, have been overseen by a team of Soka Gakkai-associated translators in Tokyo whose consistent purpose has been to provide poetic texts that are faithful to Ikeda’s authorial intent, even when recovering that intent has required the team to prepare new texts that now supersede those of earlier printed translations. While most of Ikeda’s earlier poems—those written between 1945 and the mid-1970s—tend to disclose the poet’s preoccupation with the natural environment which he approaches with a lyricism reminiscent of nineteenth-century British and American romantic writers, it would be naïve to read Ikeda exclusively through any one aesthetic, critical, historical or political lens. Indeed, we know that as a young man he was a voracious reader who encountered in pre-and post-World War II Japanese anthologies not only selections from Plato’s Dialogues, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pascal’s Pensées, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Emerson’s essays, Lord Byron’s poems and Max Weber’s essays on the sociology of religion, but also, in whole or in part, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and a wide range of Eastern and Western historical and realist fiction that included, for instance, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba (1835), Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–46), Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Lu Xun’s Chinese vernacular novella The True Story of Ah Q (1921–22) and Eiji Yoshikawa’s modern Japanese retelling of Luo Guanzhong’s fourteenth-century Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1939–43).3
As much as the enormous range of the young Ikeda’s reading may have shaped his consideration of what might be his place in postwar Japanese society, it also influenced his appreciation of the larger emerging world community into which he and his contemporaries would be invited to take part after 1945. Under the guidance of Josei Toda (1900–58), the educator and peace activist whom he credits as the great mentor of his early life and, in spirit, of his later career, Ikeda immersed himself in studies of the Lotus Sutra and in the value-creating educational philosophy of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871–1944), the educational theorist and religious reformer whose opposition to Japan’s militarism led to his imprisonment and death during World War II. Toda’s generosity as a mentor and his modeling of productive citizenship in postwar Japan encouraged Ikeda to locate and cherish the spiritual—as opposed to the nominally religious—content of all human experience, adhere to the public and private practice of greeting the ideas and opinions of others with humility and respect, and engage in earnest, candid dialogue with his countrymen as well as with persons hailing from distant nations as means to effect mutual understanding and live in peaceful coexistence.4
Although multiple printings of his major prose works demonstrate his competency in that genre, poetry has served Ikeda as an equally significant vehicle to address his ideas and personal convictions to the world. If in his early years he ever wondered about the variety of poet he wished to become, no explicit evidence of his thoughts on the subject has been found. In his own Preface to Songs from My Heart, an early collection of his poems translated into English, he likens his casual practice of poetry to Goethe’s claim about his: “All my poems are occasional poems, suggested by real life, and having therein a firm foundation.” Yet while Ikeda, too, acknowledges that his poems “spring from real life, … from the daily whirlwind of activities that I, like any ordinary person, find myself engaged in,” he emphasizes the importance of feeling to all of them—of “feelings that have come to me in the course of my association with friends or … with young people,” of feelings born out “of basic human emotions” and the honest expression of them—which, he then states, may well be “the true definition of poetry, regardless of the form it happens to take.”5
Enlarging on his view that feelings or emotions, and the honest expression of them, constitute “the true definition of poetry,” a decade after Songs from My Heart appeared in print Ikeda had the occasion to develop further his thoughts on poetry in an essay addressed to the World Congress of Poets, which convened in Bangkok in November 1988. Under the title “A plea for the restoration of the poetic mind,” he presented the case for poetry as “the spiritual bond that links humanity, society and the universe.” Invoking the fundamental duality attributed to the human mind by Pascal in Pensées and other writings, Ikeda argued for the supremacy of the “sensitive” dimension of the mind marked by intuition and sensibility over the “geometric” dimension marked exclusively by rationalism and overreliance on the significance of matter. In a world that he characterized as wallowing in “unchecked egoism, ephemeral hedonism, compulsive destruction, despair[,] … nihilism, [and the tragedy of] … the isolated and alienated human spirit,” Ikeda dismissed rationalism, material science and technology’s overwhelming of civilization with new forms of matter that lessen the flow of human sensitivity necessary for “the wholesome development of civilization,” and he asserted that poetry, whose wellspring is that portion of the human heart that is “spirit” and “invisible,” has the capacity to link “all … in the great circle of the universe.” Introducing the “poetic mind” and the “poetic heart” and treating them as identical, he wrote of the poet’s heart/mind:
The gaze of the poet is directed at the heart, at the mind. He does not see … things as mere matter. He converses with the trees and the grasses, talks to the stars, greets the sun, and feels a kinship with all that is around him. In all these things he sees life and he breathes life into them, seeing in the myriad changing phenomena of this world the unchanging principle of the universe. And the poet is free of the fetters imposed by institutions and ideologies; he perceives the unlimited potential of the individual that transcends the trappings of society. He recognizes the bond that links all humankind and intricacies of the invisible web of life … [T]he wellspring of this prolific spirit [is] the “poetic mind.”
The poetic mind is the source of human imagination and creativity. It imparts hope to our life, … gives us dreams, and infuses us with courage; it makes possible harmony and unity and gives us the power … to transform our inner world from utter desolation to richness and creativity.6
Ikeda’s conviction that the poetic heart/mind “is the source of human imagination and creativity[,] … imparts hope to our life, … gives us dreams, … infuses us with courage [and] … makes possible harmony and unity [as it] gives us the power … to transform our inner world from utter desolation to richness and creativity” at once provides us with a personal definition of his sense of the purpose and intended outcome of his poetry, and, at the same time, joins his poetic theory and practice to that of poets from the Enlightenment to the present. For instance, writing toward the end of the Enlightenment, the German “Novalis” (Friedrich von Hardenberg) affirmed poetry’s relevance in any and all political states, saying, “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”7 Then, at the height of the British romantic period, poets such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley more formally theorized the aesthetic and political power of poetry. Keats emphasized the aesthetic virtually to the exclusion of the political, arguing, for instance, that “Poetry should surprise by fine excess and not by Singularity—it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.”8 In A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley drew attention to the ways in which poets have always been energized as well as humbled by “the electric life which burns within their words.” However, far more than Keats, Shelley also recognized that some political theorists have feared the capacity of poetry’s moral and emotional electricity to lead readers, particularly young ones, to question the conventional values of their elders and thus foment revolution; and he pointed to Plato’s exile of poets from the ideal political state he envisioned in The Republic as the supreme illustration of that fear in practice. Noting that, because it “is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted,” poetry also has the capacity to “[redeem] from decay the visitations of the divinity in man,” Shelley challenged political theorists by straightforwardly acknowledging the subversive power of poetry that Plato so feared. In Western literature’s boldest rejoinder to positions such as Plato’s, at the conclusion of A Defence he proclaimed, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” thereby marrying the aesthetic and healing power of poetry, which draws from and appeals to the imagination, to the revolutionary power of poetry, which draws from the conviction of political or social urgency out of which a poet may write.9
Shelley’s position, which has withstood all challenges for two centuries, still rings true among poets and theorists closer to our own time. Writing for the literary journal The Dial in the aftermath of World War I, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore asserted in 1926, “Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity.”10 Although his emphasis was more on the aesthetic power of poetry than on the political, writing for the Saturday Review in mid-century the British playwright, novelist and literary theorist W. Somerset Maugham agreed with Moore, saying, “The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy.”11 Finally, as the twentieth century neared its end, the African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks told an interviewer in 1986, “I always say that poetry is life distilled.” Like her poetry, in an important way Brooks’ statement of her poetic practice returns us to Shelley, for in her recognition of poetry as “life distilled” she reminds us that poetic art is not designed to warm us only in our joyous moods, but to rouse us as well to action during those moments in which we need clarification of the sometimes confusing, if not also literally terrifying, events of the world around us, even if, in turn, that clarification counsels us to break with our own current or past cultural practices or those of our nation.12
With his emphasis on the poetic heart/mind, and his confidence that the genuine poet “perceives the unlimited potential of the individual that transcends the trappings of society” because he “is free of the fetters imposed by institutions and ideologies,” Ikeda candidly acknowledges his adherence to a tradition of poetic practice that extends from the Enlightenment to today. It is a tradition that ignores those cultural and national distinctions and resists those institutional and ideological positions that, at the expense of feeling, have preoccupied bureaucratic minds across the centuries. With Ikeda, the freedom and feeling of the genuine poet reign supreme; as he has said, “A person who sees himself and others as fellow beings … and who knows the pain, the anguish, and the pathos of others,” can never be “cold and calculating.”13 The generosity of spirit with which Ikeda invests the poet has its origin in his own character, for sure, but it also has a source in a late essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, of which Ikeda is quite fond. In “Poetry and Imagination” (1876), Emerson remarked, “The poet should rejoice if he has taught us to despise his song; if he has so moved us as to lift us,—to open the eye of the intellect to see farther and better” than he.14 Emerson is certainly not ridiculing either the poet or the poet’s reader here; rather, he is celebrating the capacity of all good readers of poetry to be poets themselves, and the capacity of genuine poets to inspire and move their readers to look within themselves for the license to read and write their world as a poem and thus eclipse the poet and the poetry that once inspired them. This is the spirit in which Ikeda has personally overseen the production of this first comprehensive volume of his poems in English translation, and it is the spirit in which he graciously invites readers into it. That his position with respect to readers of this volume and the two that will follow it should echo Emerson is not a surprise to the present writer. In Creating Waldens: An East–West Conversation on the American Renaissance, a series of eighteen conversations on Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Whitman and the aesthetic, spiritual and political world of the American Renaissance that they so dominated, Ikeda said:
I believe that if a poet can perceive the infinite possibilities of humanity, his poetry naturally becomes a song in praise of humanity. The perception of those possibilities is really the perception of interconnectedness, like that between friends, between humanity and nature, and between humanity and the cosmos. Poetry crystallizes the surprise and emotion of awakening to such connections.15
Ronald A. Bosco
1. Daisaku Ikeda, “A plea for the restoration of the poetic mind,” World Tribune (Santa Monica CA), December 12, 1988, p. 3. As discussed below, in this essay Ikeda is reported to have used the expressions “the poetic heart” and “the poetic mind” synonymously; however, these are actually two alternate translations of the term shigokoro, the kokoro of shi (poetry). Kokoro is a particularly rich term in Japanese, indicating at once the affective, volitional and even rational aspects of the inner life. Not acknowledging the possibility of a heart–mind disjunction in the poet, Ikeda writes that the poetic heart/mind “is the source of human imagination and creativity. It imparts hope to our life, … gives us dreams, and infuses us with courage; it makes possible harmony and unity and gives us the power … to transform our inner world from utter desolation to richness and creativity.”
2. For a sample of lyrical verses celebrating naturalistic subjects large and small, in this volume see “Blossoms that scatter” (1945), “Fuji and the poet” (1947), “Weeds” (1971), “Pampas grass” (1971), “Pampas grass, the poet’s friend” (2007) and “In praise of morning glories” (2007). Among the major poems in this volume in which Ikeda addresses his fellow Japanese citizens and various constituencies of the global Soka Gakkai community are “The people” (1971), “Arise, the sun of the century” (1987), “Youthful country with a shining future” (1988), “Be an eternal bastion of peace” (1988), “The sun of jiyu over a new land” (1993), “Standing among the ruins of Takiyama Castle” (2000) and “Salute to the smiling faces of the twenty-first century” (2001). For poems to women that address personal empowerment that transcends gender boundaries, see, especially, “Mother” (1971), “Salute to mothers” (1995) and “May the fragrant laurels of happiness adorn your life” (1999). For poems of personal introduction offered out of respect for Gandhi, Mandela and Aquino, see “The lion’s land, Mother India” (1987), “Banner of humanism, path of justice” (1990) and “Shine brilliantly! Crown of the Mother of the Philippines” (1991), respectively; for poems dedicated to Nataliya Sats, pioneer of children’s theater in Russia, Walt Whitman, American poet, Yehudi Menuhin, famed violinist, Oswald Mtshali, South African poet, and Esther Gress, Danish poet laureate, see “Mother of art, the sunlight of happiness” (1990), “Like the sun rising” (1992), “Cosmic traveler, our century’s premier violinist” (1992), “The poet—warrior of the spirit” (1998) and “Together holding aloft laurels of the people’s poetry” (2000), respectively.
3. For these and other of his youthful readings, see Daisaku Ikeda, Wakaki hi no dokusho (The Readings of My Youthful Days) (Tokyo: Daisan Bunmeisha, 1978) and Daisaku Ikeda, Zoku, wakaki hi no dokusho (The Readings of My Youthful Days, continued) (Tokyo: Daisan Bunmeisha, 1993).
4. Ikeda celebrates the breadth and enduring value of Toda’s legacy to him and to others in “My mentor, Josei Toda” (1986), printed in this volume.
5. Daisaku Ikeda, “Preface,” in Songs from My Heart, trans. Burton Watson (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1978), p. 7.
6. Daisaku Ikeda, “A plea for the restoration of the poetic mind,” p. 3.
7. Friedrich von Hardenberg, Detached Thoughts, quoted in Dictionary of Quotations in Communications, ed. Lilless McPherson Shilling and Linda K. Fuller (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 165.
8. John Keats, to John Taylor, February 27, 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. 1, p. 238.
9. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins, 2nd edn. (New York, London, Tokyo: Harcourt Brace, 1995), pp. 1146, 1134, 1143, 1144, 1146, respectively.
10. Patricia C. Willis, ed., The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 169.
11. W. Somerset Maugham, “Comment,” Saturday Review (New York) July 20, 1957, p. 70.
12. Kevin Bezner, “A life distilled: An interview with Gwendolyn Brooks” (1986), in Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Gloria Wade Gayles (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), p. 124.
13. Daisaku Ikeda, “A plea for the restoration of the poetic mind,” p. 3.
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poetry and imagination,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson and Ronald A. Bosco, 10 vols (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), vol. 8, p. 38.
15. Ronald A. Bosco, Daisaku Ikeda, and Joel Myerson, Creating Waldens: An East–West Conversation on the American Renaissance (Cambridge MA: Dialogue Path Press, 2009), p. 116.