Abstract
Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241), of the illustrious Fujiwara clan, was a son of Fujiwara Shunzei (1114–1204) who, as a poet and critic of poetry, occupied the highest position at the Imperial Court and enjoyed an unrivaled prestige, crowned with glories of poetic honors. Like his father, Lord Teika made himself known in the literary world of his age not only as a poet of the highest rank but also as the foremost theoretician of waka-poetry, endowed with an unusually sharp critical mind and an exquisitely refined poetic taste. He was in fact a man ofletters typically representative ofthe aesthetic culture of the Shinkokin period of Japanese history, an age named after the eighth imperial anthology, Shinkokin-shū of which he was one of the compilers.
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Notes
Manyo-shû is the oldest extant collection of Japanese poetry compiled most probably after 750 A.D.
The Mode with-Mind does not consist of expressing thought through the syntactic meaning of the poetic sentence; rather it aims primarily at producing yo jô, an aesthetic saturation, through the associative linkage of semantic articulation. This peculiarity of the Mode with-Mind seems to make it most appropriate for emotional themes such as reminiscence and love. See Preliminary Essay I.
On Kokin-shū see Preliminary Essay I, note 6.
That is, those poems whose words are beautiful as an immediate manifestation of the rectified kokoro.
Monk Shun-e, a son of Minamoto Toshiyori (see the following note).
Minamoto Toshiyori (d. 1029), the author of the Toshiyori Zuino, a book on the theory of poetry written in 1014.
In many cases a single character, when read in Japanese, phonetically turns into a word of more than one syllable.
Bybtô is a technical defect in which the first word of the upper strophe is the same as that of the lower strophe.
Seiin is a case in which the last word of the upper strophe happens to be the same as that of the lower strophe.
Fujiwara Kiyosuke (1004–1077), a poet and theoretician of poetry, author of a number of important books on the theory of waka, a rival of Shunzei in this field.
Kanpy6 period: 889–898.
Genkyû era: 1204–1206.
Bright Moon Record’, Meigetsu-ki. Under this same title there are two works attributed to Teika, one of them being his personal diary covering 55 years of his life from the age of 19, and the other an independent book on the theory of poetry, which, however, has not come down to us. The Meigetsu-ki spoken of here seems to refer to the latter.
Hakurakuten, one of the most famous Chinese poets of the T’ang dynasty.
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Teika, F. (1981). Maigetsushō. In: The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3481-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3481-3_5
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