SOURCE: Brower, Robert H. “Fujiwara Teika's Maigetsusho.” Monumenta Nipponica 40, no. 4 (winter 1985): 399-425.

In the following essay, Brower recounts the manuscript history of Teika's critical treatise Maigetsusho and encapsulates the principles of poetic composition it contains.

The single most influential figure in the history of Japanese classical poetry, Fujiwara Teika (or Sadaie), 1162-1241, was the supreme arbiter of poetry in his own day, and for centuries after his death was held in religious veneration by waka and renga poets alike. Teika's unique reputation rested in part upon his accomplishment as the leading figure among the many fine poets of the Shinkokin Jidai, the period of fifty-odd years in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when revival and innovation in the native poetry were exemplified in Shinkokinshū, ca. 1204, the eighth, and in many respects the greatest, of the imperially sponsored anthologies of classical verse. As one of the six...