SOURCE: Keene, Donald. “Renga.” In Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century, pp. 926-70. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1993.

In the following excerpt, Keene examines Yoshimoto's renga advice and criticism, as well as the poetry collections he compiled.

… The chief figure in the elevation of renga from a game to a demanding and artistically important art was Nijō Yoshimoto, a noble of the highest rank who rose in 1346 to be kampaku and head of the Fujiwara clan.¹ Yoshimoto was a waka poet of some distinction. His early training was in the conservative waka of the Nijō school, and at one time he studied under Ton'a, the leading Nijō poet of the day. Yoshimoto did not neglect waka composition, even after he became the preeminent theoretician of renga. More than sixty of his waka were included in imperial collections, and...