Haiku of Hawaii. Annette Schafer Morrow

      Introduction

      POETRY is the voice of man's humanity. It is that special art form, that private vocabulary, that staple gratification of every civilization, in which the writer speaks to the reader of things they both have known or dreamed together: it makes conversation of the ways in which we are alike, which are many more than the ways in which we are different. It speaks in the words of our mutual delights, alarms, nostalgias, and excitements: the little things we've always seen and wondered at, the big things that drive or lead us all, the family interests of brothers in humanity.

      This expression of life makes up the mass from which each art is hewn, and the competent chisel of form shapes from it art itself.

      The art of poetry can be carved out of human experience with many tools. The strictly measured Western rhythms and rhymes have their Eastern parallels in syllable count and rhythm of thought. Uses of the same figures of speech occur in both; forms, too, are more the same than different throughout the world and time.