Go-Toba was one of the most gifted and ambitious of Japan's emperors. Talented in poetry and music as well as sports and martial arts, he wrote uta, renga, Chinese poetry, and criticism and is known especially as sponsor of the eighth imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, Shin kokinshu (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times, 1205), which is usually thought to contain more great poetry than any other of the twenty-one imperial anthologies. He was an energetic participant in its compilation. Through his sponsorship of occasions for poetic composition, patronage of the best poets of his day, critical writings, and editing of the Shin kokinshu, he played a major role in the development of a new literary aesthetic in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. His attempts to exert political power against the military government, or bakufu, however, led to exile to the remote Oki Islands during the...