SOURCE: An introduction to Face at the Bottom of the World, and Other Poems by Hagiwara Sakutarō, translated by Graeme Wilson, Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1969, pp. 11-32.

In the following excerpt, Wilson discusses Hagiwara's contributions to modern Japanese poetry, noting the influences of European philosophy on his works and his success at integrating western and Japanese poetic styles.

Hagiwara began writing during that critical period in the history of Japanese literature when western influences, almost overwhelming in the Meiji Era (1868-1912), were at last being so successfully assimilated as to permit the regrowth of that essentially Japanese spirit which characterized the succeeding Taisho Era (1912-26). By 1910 the seeds dropped from foreign flowers, not all of them Fleurs du Mal, into the loam of Japanese consciousness were coming up like cryptomeria. Wakon yōsai, that Meiji slogan stressing the need to meld "western learning and the Japanese spirit", was...