SOURCE: "Some Longer Poems of Hagiwara Sakutarō," in Japan Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1972, pp. 170-81.

In the following essay, Wilson assesses critical appraisals of Hagiwara's works.

The last few years have seen a steady enhancement, both within Japan and outside Japan, of the reputation of Hagiwara Sakutarō as the best poet there to have emerged during the last hundred years. His outstanding quality has, of course long been recognized by his more perceptive fellow-countrymen. "He was," wrote Miyoshi Tatsuji, "the greatest poet on earth. Such a poet could hardly be found in an hundred years." But that recognition has often been qualified by a basic feeling, however variously expressed, that he really went too far; that his neurasthenic vision of reality was less a poetic analysis or exposure of extreme states of human feeling than a deliberate harrying by a skilled poet of the human nervous system. There will...