Excerpted from Kirkup’s introduction to The Genius of Haiku: readings from R. H. Blyth on poetry, life and Zen. Published by the British Haiku Society.
I first became aware of the works of Blyth in 1952 or 1953, when I held the Gregory Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Leeds. It was also a time when I when I was discovering Chinese and Japanese poetry and philosophy, and reading books on Zen Buddhism that were beginning to proliferate in those days, and to have a certain influence on the Beat poets of America. whom I barely knew, though I had heard of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and the City Lights poets. I was also reading the works of Daisetz Suzliki and Alan Watts, the gurus of the Beat Generation.