However improbable it might seem at first sight, at some level, is it not true that without Basho’s fascination with the splash of a frog in the seventeenth century, Ezra Pound could not have shaped the modernist sensibility dominant throughout the first half of the twentieth century?īe that as it may, what most inspires my present essay derives from Wai Chee Dimock’s recent lecture, “Thoreau’s Green Infrastructure” (2010), in which she points out the contrast between the frogs depicted in Chapter Four of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and the frogs represented by Emily Yoffe’s New York Times Magazine article in a 1992 issue, “The Silence of the Frogs.” Let us begin by glancing at Thoreau’s pastoral characterization of the frogs in the chapter of Walden entitled “Sounds”:Ī mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore.
Basho’s haiku include the well-known masterpiece featuring frogs: “Furu ike ya / Kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto” (Into an ancient pond / a frog jumps / splash of water). Yonejiro Noguchi, the first Japanese poet to compose poems in English, and a figure who provided insight into links between American Renaissance poet Walt Whitman’s pathos and seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho’s haiku. Very recently, in her 2011 keynote lecture “Global America Revisited: Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Modernist Japonisme,” delivered at the fifth Nanzan American Studies Summer Seminar, Anita Patterson pointed out that Ezra Pound could not have launched the Imagist poetry movement without the trans-national impact of Yone Noguchi, a.k.a. Frogs have consistently inspired the literary imagination, from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1849 black-comic tale “Hop-Frog,” featuring a “freak” seeking revenge on a harsh king, to Mark Twain’s 1865 hoax, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” based upon an incredible folktale from the heyday of the Gold Rush, to Loren Eiseley’s 1978 piece of nature writing “The Dance of the Frogs,” in which the “discovery of latent stores of energy and agility” (113) is transcendentally related to amphibia, down to Patrick Süskind’s 1985 magic realist novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, whose anti-hero, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (or “frog” in French), is endowed with hyperosmia, a keen sense of smell.
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