Epilogue

Abstract

This chapter returns to one of the compilers of Shintaishi shō, Inoue Tetsujiro, who bemusedly acknowledged, late in the second decade of the twentieth century, that the shintaishi had all but disappeared from Japanese poetry. He seems to have been unaware of the literary-critical wrangling that had greeted or decried—and, earlier, had called for or hoped to prevent—the creation of meter-free poetry in Japanese. The chapter then looks at the enormous expansion that had taken place in Japanese poets' familiarity with poetries abroad, especially English, French, and German. It assesses Inoue's thought that Japanese poets of the time had forgotten their own recent history—or, to inflect the matter differently, had forgotten him. By looking at Inoue's reflections, the chapter offers us an eyewitness view, biased as it was, of the episodes that had so rapidly transformed Japanese poetry—a history in which he himself had played a crucial role.