SOURCE: "Poetic Practice" and "Consolidations, New Developments, and Decline" in Japanese Court Poetry, Stanford University Press, 1961, pp. 198-220.

In the following excerpt, Brower and Miner discuss the diction. rhetorical techniques, syntax, subjects, themes, and tone of the Kokinshu.

… Poetic Language and Imagery

The different conventional modes illustrate the complex adjustment of personal response to social environment which is basic to the age. One will fail to understand either the good or the inferior poetry of the period unless one realizes that it produced poem after poem which was at once personal and conventional—or that the great poems of the age are not the songs of Romantic poets singing in the wilderness of their own originality but a personal lyricism in a social context. By comparison with Western poetry, this description is perhaps appropriate for the whole history of Japanese poetry down to modem times, but the particular...