New Styles of Criticism for a New Style of Poetry

Abstract

This chapter highlights the reign of the emperor Meiji in Japan in which translations of poetry in Western languages aimed at a broad public began to appear. It examines the premier of these, Shintaishi shō (New-style poetry collection), an anthology that introduced to Japanese readers such writers as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Longfellow, while it also trumpeted the creation of a new poetic form: the shintaishi or new-style shi. The compilers of Shintaishi shō claimed that other, extant varieties of Japanese poetry such as the haikai (haiku), the waka, and the chōka were unsuited for expressing the complex thoughts and feelings of modern, up-to-date nineteenth-century Japanese subjects: hence the necessity of inventing a new poetic form. The chapter then displays the anti-translation stance of the waka poet Ikebukuro Kiyokaze, a strident critic of the shintaishi. It also presents another damaging critique of the shintaishi by a prominent Japanese psychologist, Motora Yūjirō, who argued that the repetitive, insistent rhythm of the shintaishi—which, like the chōka, was composed of recurrent fives and sevens—was detrimental to the brains of Japanese readers, which needed rhythmical variety for healthy functioning.