Forms of Japanese Poetry
by EARL ROY MINER
COMPRESSION is one pole of Japanese poetry; the other is richness of imagery and language. Because the imagery is traditional, the poet need only suggest in brief strokes. Because the poems are short, the maximum in imaginative response is expected from the reader. And because the themes are familiar, much may be left unsaid. Japanese poetry is at once curiously personal and public, traditional and yet fresh.
Its nature is reflected in the compact forms which tradition has made conventional. The oldest of these which is still widely employed today is the Tanka, regularly composed of 5 lines of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables. Japanese prosody came to be based upon syllable-count because the language has no stress accent, as in English, or quantity, as in Latin. And rhyme has never been featured because it would have little force in an unstressed language where every word ends in one of a few simple vowel sounds and there are few consonant clusters. Traditionally, the Tanka has been used for occasional poems and to express a personal lyric response. In our collection, the poem by His Majesty the Emperor is an example of the Tanka.
The Haiku,which was developed in the 17th century, is composed of 17 syllables. Haiku is a poetry of nature in the Buddho-Taoist conception which includes man as an integral part within nature. It is based largely on natural images with religious overtones, and each Haiku is traditionally required to have one “season-word" or expression which implies a time of year. Natsume’s poems are examples of Haiku.
Modernism entered Japanese poetry with the wave of Western influence which began late in the 19th century, first in the translation of European poets and then in a general broadening of poetic subject matter. But the poets of this Shintaishi movement retained the old rhythms of 5and 7-syllable lines even when expressing new attitudes in poems of some length. Today their successors are breaking even more radically with the old conventions of content. At the same time, “free verse" poets have sought a wider range of subjects and have utilized lines of varying numbers of syllables. Katue Kitasono’s surrealistic Poetry Going Out is an example of this tendency.
Poetry is extremely popular in Japan today. To be able to write a graceful poem for any occasion is part of the social training of an educated Japanese. Readers are plentiful for a large number of magazines devoted to the work of different poetic schools.