SOURCE: Keene, Donald. “The Comic Tradition in Renga.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, edited by John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi, pp. 241-77. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

In the following essay, Keene provides a history of Japanese linked verse, credits Yoshimoto with expanding the range of allowable words in poetry, and commends his keen appreciation of the present.

Renga (linked verse) was the most typical literary art of the Muromachi period. The many court poets of the traditional waka undoubtedly believed that their chosen form of poetry possessed greater dignity, and even the renga masters would probably have concurred in this opinion, not only because of the great antiquity of the waka but because of the miraculous powers with which it was credited, even to moving the gods and demons. However, it is surely significant that the twenty-first and last imperial anthology, the Shin zoku kokin...