It would be tempting to speculate on the reasons for the expanding popularity of haiku poetry today, especially in the United States. Ours is an anti-poetic age, we proudly claim, in which the natural appetite of the child and adolescent for poetry is scorned and suppressed by social pressures and a predominantly scientific and technical education. At most, a few crumbs from the banquet may be thrown to the humanities, Or a tame poet kept in a cage on the campus. The modern poets themselves are much to blame, with their cult of solipsistic obscurity and cacophonous experimentation. To those starved for poetic nourishment, they have all too Often served a tasteless pulp Of words instead of meat and drink, so that their readers have turned away to a more palatable and digestible prose. Though our ancestors as recent as the Victorians had epic appetites and could consume whole novels in verse, capacities since then have sadly shrunk, so that as the late R. H. Blyth complained: .we can now Only take our poetry in homeopathic doses." But the current interest in haiku leads one to suppose that there may still be people left who long to read something more lively and colourful than a biochemical formula, and that the poetic impulse may be harder to stamp out than our technical educators had hoped.