The first modern Japanese poetry

“The First Modern Japanese Poetry” substantiates the modernism of the earliest examples of shintaishi, “new poetry,” commonly represented in scholarship as either mimetic or regressive. I revise the belief that these late-nineteenth century poems were only precursors to proper twentieth-century modernism, thus doing something to bring study of Japanese poetry up to speed with other areas of Japanese studies in which previous assessment of Japanese modernity as belated or incomplete has been rectified. At the same time I show how the composition of poetry was involved in conception of and reaction to discourses of state building, militarism, and education. The main text under consideration is the 1882 Shintaishishō, “Selection of New Poetry,” produced by three young teachers at Tokyo University. I closely read the poems and prefaces of this collection, analyze its construction and dissemination, and address its legacy. Attention to the language of the poems and the apparatus of their presentation makes it clear that the first shintaishi was derivative not only of foreign but also of Japanese traditions, and also that the poems are ultimately original. Inventive appropriation and adaptation established the development of a new poetic voice, connected to new ideas of nation and person, as happened around the world in the 1880s. Despite this likeness, in methodology I incline away from comparison, working to let the Shintaishishō stand for itself. Ultimately I challenge the work\u27s designation as “ the first modern Japanese poetry,” entrenched early in Japanese scholarship and adopted into English-language scholarship. I track the genesis of the collection\u27s reputation as part of my project to undo its status as the origin that is unworthy of scrutiny but that nonetheless must be cited out of faithfulness to genealogies. In getting to the roots of what shintaishi was at the time of its inception, I argue for nuance and diversity in claims to poetic modernism, at the same time that I hold to the agency of language and poetic form