SOURCE: Bundy, Roselee. “Poetic Apprenticeship: Fujiwara Teika's Shogaku Hyakushu.” Monumenta Nipponica 45, no. 2 (summer 1990): 157-88.

In the following essay, Bundy evaluates the poetry of Teika's early collection Shogaku hyakushu, contrasting it with the verse of his father, Fujiwara no Shunzei, and pointing out the significance of Teika's manipulation of imagery rather than his cultivation of an emotionally compelling lyrical voice in this work.

In the Fourth Month of 1181 Fujiwara Teika, 1162-1241, then aged twenty, composed his first hundred-poem sequence, Shogaku Hyakushu. Teika had made his public debut as a poet in Wakeikazuchi-sha Uta-awase in the Third Month of 1178, and Shogaku Hyakushu signaled his mastery of that other vehicle of formal poetry, the writing of poem sequences. Both the poetry contest and the poem sequence required the poet to contend with the complexities of composition on topics and issues of decorum and poetic precedents, without a knowledge of which no...