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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
An anthology necessarily follows “personal predilection,” stressed William Rose Benét, having discharged his end of Famous English and American Poetry, whereas Conrad Aiken, having done his, chose to note, “American poetry has been extensively anthologized.”(1) What Aiken said hardly applies to modern Japanese poetry,(2) but what Benét said does, and not just to the anthology I've recently published, Japanese Women Poets (M.E. Sharpe, 2007), of course, but also, with startling force, to the male-female proportions in some of the larger-scale anthologies. These are often oddly mislabeled zenshu, “complete works.”
(1) An Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry (The Modern Library, 1944, 1945), p. 5 and p. 313.
(2) In the past half-century there have been at least two attempts to encompass, in a single volume, Japanese poetry in all ages and in all forms except kanshi, poems written in classical Chinese, according to Maruya Saiichi in his idiosyncratic account of Japanese literature, Nihon bungaku hayawakari (Kodansha, 1984). These are Nihon shikasho, ed. Saigo Nobutsuna, Ando Tsuguo, and Hirosue Tamotsu (Miraisha, 1958), and Nihon shiikasho, ed. Yamamoto Kenkichi (Heibonsha, 1959).
(3) Orikuchi Shinobu, Josei tanka-shi (History of Tanka by Women), Zenshu, vol. 11 (Chuo Koron Sha, 1956; 4th rev. ed., 1984), p. 48.
(4) In his preface to Gendai no tanka, Tsukamoto Kunio mentions an anthology of poems in all forms but limited to the Showa era, Showa shiikasho, ed. Kubota Utsuho (Shogakukan, 1990).
(5) It would not be fair for me not to add that Orikuchi, like Arthur Waley, despaired of the rhetorical complexities embodied in much of Teika's anthology
(6) Hollander's email to Sato, 19 July 2008. The Library of America has so far published two of the planned four volumes of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century.
(7) Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, selected and edited by Robert Giroux (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994), pp. 548-549. The title of this collection of Bishop's letters comes from that of one of her poems.
(8) In my forthcoming article in Gengo bunka, the periodical of the language institute of the Meiji Gakuin University, I discuss the difficulties involved in making selections for the earlier period, the question of translation, and other matters.
(9) The citizenship status of Koreans in Japan between 1910 and 1945 somewhat resembles that of Puerto Ricans in the United States since the Jones-Stafroth Act, of 1917.
(10) Hiroaki Sato, tr., Reiko Koyanagi: Rabbit of the Nether World (Red Moon Press, 1999). Koyanagi is one of several woman poets for whom I managed to work out individual volumes before and after I began work on Japanese Women Poets.
(11) Hiroaki Sato, tr., The Girl Who Turned into Tea: Poems of Nagashima Minako (P.A., A Press, 2000).
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