Lord Tamekane's Notes on Poetry. Tamekanekyo Wakasho

J APANESE poetry in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was dominated by a bitter dispute between two lines of Fujiwara Teika's )i; SS descendants, the Nijo a and the Kyogoku YW/Reizei 7 branches of the family. To complicate matters further, the dispute was as much political as poetic for each of the two lines had its imperial backers, who were themselves locked in a struggle for the throne. However nebulous the political differences may appear to us today, the artistic ones are quite clear. The Nijo group took a more conservative approach toward poetry, while the Kyogoku/Reizei poets, headed by Kyogoku Tamekane *, 1254-1332, were more innovative, willing to bend the traditional rules in order to revitalize poetry. Yet however important such innovations would prove to the development of renga AS in the Muromachi period, the Kyogoku poets were somewhat less well received by their peers. Politically very active, Tamekane made many important enemies, and this probably accounts for the dearth of his surviving theoretical writings. Although there is hope that the recently opened Shigure-tei holdings of the Reizei family' may yield new materials relevant to Tamekane, at present we have few sources from which to construct his poetics. Important in this regard, of course, are his poems, which number about 530.2 Also of some use are a

Art · Literature · Poetry · History · Japanese History and Culture

• The rise of haikai

  Open Access•Haruo Shirane•Cambridge History of Japanese…•2015

  Add to list

• Translation, vernacular style, and the Westernesque femme fatale in modern Japanese literature

  Open Access•Indra Levy•Cambridge History of Japanese…•2015

  Add to list

• The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature

  Open Access•David B Lurie, Torquil Duthie et al.•Cambridge History of Japanese…•2015

  Add to list