“This Dead Form, Begone”

Abstract

This chapter opens with the essayist and poet Kitamura Tōkoku's poetry, which can be described as free verse: Soshū no shi (The poem of a prisoner). Tōkoku himself did not broadcast his poem's characteristics effectively, and its metrical novelty went unremarked by the literary establishment. Later, in the last months of 1890 and the first months of 1891, several poets and poetry critics became embroiled in a debate over whether meter was an essential trait of poetry or not. The chapter then introduces Yamada Bimyō's “Nihon inbun ron” (On Japanese verse). Bimyō argued that any nation that aspired to a high level of civilization must embrace a metrically regular poetry, and to that end he advocated the adoption, by Japanese poets, of English prosodic structures (iambs, anapests, and the like)—a position that encountered much resistance from other poets and critics. Ultimately, the chapter focuses on the distinction and link between meter and rhythm in language. It examines another text of Tōkoku titled Hōraikyoku (Song of Mount Hōrai), which included sections in prose and metrically free verse.