Some ten or fifteen years ago the poems of “storm and stress” overflowed in Japan; in this phase our poets were not far behind their Western brothers.
It was in the early fifteenth of Meiji (1882) when the Shintaishi were first introduced by the professors of the Imperial University, the late Masakazu Toyama, Tetsutaro Inouye, and others, who published their collections of new poems and translations from the Western poets. But in fact there was not much to consider till Toson Shimazaki appeared some ten years later.
II
Shimazaki’s Wakanashu enthroned him at once as the master of Shintaishi; in that respect he reminds us of Bryant, who suddenly illumined the dearth of early American poetry. (How undeveloped was this new-style poem before his appearance like a comet!) Even Shimazaki’s actual work of his early days, A Ramble in the Forest for instance, with quite an interesting interruption in a sort of duet:
Mountain Spirit.
“The deer, when they fall to death,
Return to love of their wives.
“The fields and hills, when they wither away,
Return to Spring a thousand years old.”
