Yone Noguchi

Poet and critic Yone Noguchi (father of Isamu Noguchi, the internationally renowned sculptor and designer) was the first Japanese-born writer to publish poetry in English. He was born in Tsushima, Japan and studied at Keio Gijuku University in Tokyo. In 1893, he moved to San Francisco, California, where he worked as a journalist and published his first poems in The Lark. In 1905, he moved back to Japan, and his writing career continued to flourish. Noguchi’s celebrated collection The Pilgrimage (1909) contained six haiku, a spare and direct form that inspired Ezra Pound and the Imagist movement. Noguchi’s many other books include Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi (1921), Kamakura (1910), and The Summer Cloud (1906). He also wrote literary criticism for the Japan Times from 1906 to 1908. On November 3, 1907, he published his most notable piece, “Mr. Yeats and the No,” which suggested that William Butler Yeats should study Noh, a form of classical Japanese drama.

Noguchi traveled and lectured widely throughout his lifetime. In 1913, he gave lectures on Japanese poetry at Magdalen College, Oxford and the Japan Society of London. In London, he met and conversed with numerous significant writers and artists, including Yeats, Pound, George Bernard Shaw, Laurence Binyon, Arthur Symons, Sarojini Naidu, Roger Fry, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Joseph Pennell, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. From 1919 to 1920, Noguchi visited many US cities; he lectured at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Utah, among others.

Noguchi’s house in Nakano, Tokyo was destroyed in the US bombing of Tokyo in April 1945. He died in Toyooka-mura, Japan on July 13, 1947.