Notes on musicality in the beginning of Japanese modern poetry

Abstract

The article proposes to analyze how modern Japanese poetry dealt with the question of musicality in its beginning, since, for the first time, Japanese poets and critics met poems in European languages that used poetic resources that did not exist in classical Japanese poetry like the meter, the stanza, and the rhyme. First, we will see how the collections Shintaishi shō (Selection of Poetry in New Style, 1882), and Omokage (Vestiges, 1889) translated poems in European languages to Japanese in an attempt to create Japanese poetry in the new form. The translations encouraged a wide range of theoretical responses, among which we will focus on that of Yamada Bimyō, who defended the need for a rhythm proper to the new form poetry. Next, we will deal with the formal innovations brought by Shimazaki Tōson’s poems. However, in the end, he considered these innovations to be insufficient to elevate Japanese poetry to the musicality necessary to all poetry.