SOURCE: Bialock, David T. “Voice, Text, and the Question of Poetic Borrowing in Late Classical Japanese Poetry.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54, no. 1 (1994): 181-231.

In the following excerpt, Bialock studies Teika's influential concept of honkadori (“allusive variation”) in the context of the development of late classical Japanese poetry.

It can be said, without risk of exaggeration, that the early medieval poet Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241) is largely responsible for how scholars and students of classical Japanese literature read waka even today. Indeed, so disposed are we to seek out pre-texts for a particular waka—sometimes quite mistakenly for waka composed prior to Teika's own time—that it is easy to lose sight of just how paradoxical Teika's central achievement was: the constructing of an entire poetics around a technique of borrowing known as honkadori, when in fact the traditional poetic discourse of his day already incorporated and continued...