SOURCE: "Association and Progression: Principles of Integration in Anthologies and Sequences of Japanese Court Poetry, A.D. 900-1350," translated by Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 21, December, 1958, pp. 67-127.

In the following excerpt, Konishi demonstrates that poems in the Shinkokinshu were inspired by and developed from poetry in the Kokinshu.

… The meaning of the title, Shinkokinshū, is "New Anthology of Poems Ancient and Modern"—in other words, the "New Kokinshū." In> giving their anthology this name, the compilers were consciously expressing a neoclassical ideal and were specifying the source of their inspiration—the Kokinshū, or "Anthology of Poems Ancient and Modem," the first collection of Japanese poetry compiled by imperial command early in the tenth century. The Kokinshū remained, despite fundamental changes in poetic theory and practice, the almost universally accepted standard of propriety in poetic diction and, to a lesser extent...