Sadayo's Poetry
Sadayo began composing poetry from an early age: by the age 20, he had a poem included in an imperial anthology (the Fugashu or "Collection of Elegance"; Earl Miner gives the specific entry as XV: 1473). His teacher was Reizei no Tamehide (d. 1372). His poems were displayed to more effect in his fairly popular and influential travel diary, Michiyukiburi ("Travellings"). It was this travel diary that in large part won Sadayo a place as a respected critic of poetry: he felt that poetry should be a direct expression of personal experience, a fact that can be seen from his own poems.
Even though Sadayo is better known for his criticism of the more conservative poetry styles, the Nijo school in particular, and his tutoring of Shotetsu (1381–1459), who would become one of the finest waka poets of the fifteenth century, than he is for his own output, it nonetheless provides a glimpse in to the mind of this medieval scholar and his travels.
Sadayo was active in the poetic disputes of that day, scoring a signal victory over the Nijō adherents close to the Ashikaga Shogunate at the time with 6 polemical treatises on poetry he wrote between 1403 and 1412, defending the Reizei's poetic doctrine and their cause (despite Ryōshun's renga poetry's debt to Nijō Yoshimoto's (1320–1388) examples and rules of composition). Ryōshun used a number of quotations to bolster his case, including notably a quote of Fujiwara no Teika's, which was that all of the "ten styles" (Teika had defined ten orthodox poetic styles, such as yoen, a style concerned with "ethereal beauty", yugen, the demon-quelling style, or the one the Nijo championed to the exclusion of the other 9, ushin) were licit for poetic use and experimentation, and not merely the Nijō's ushin. With the aid Ryōshun afforded him, Fujiwara no Tanemasa's politicking eventually succeeded in converting the Shogun, ending the matter- until the rival Asukai poetic clan revived the dispute, that is.
Read more about this topic: Imagawa Sadayo
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don’t think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you’ll see what I mean.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)