The Significance of Haiku in the Poetry of Joan Salvat-Papasseit

“Vibracions” and all the other poems written by Joan Salvat- Papasseit (1894-1924) based on the Japanese haiku lyrical verse form, have generally been viewed as a mere flirt with exoticism and of minor importance. I contend that Salvat-Papasseit the poet was in fact not only very familiar with haiku poetry, but that through this verse form he found a vehicle to express his own aesthetic ideas which he began to advocate in his poetry from 1917 onwards. The significance of haiku poems is such that one could argue that they are a central symbolic feature of all his poems.