SOURCE: "Yosano Akiko," in Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Stanford University Press, 1983, pp. 53-94.

A Japanese-born critic and translator, Ueda is the author of several volumes of criticism on Japanese literature. In the following excerpt, Ueda discusses Akiko's concept of poetry and her use of the tanka verse form.

At no time during her long literary career did Yosano Akiko seek to reform poetry, as did Shiki and several other contemporary poets. "Unlike those gentlemen," she once explained, "I have never entertained a self-flattering, immodest ambition like starting a poetic reform." Nevertheless, she became one of the most influential tanka poets in modern Japan, with a reputation that matched Shiki's. She attained her fame and leadership almost solely by virtue of the poems she wrote. When her first book of tanka, Tangled Hai, was published in 1901, it shook the contemporary poetic scene because of its...