Shōtetsu

Shōtetsu (born 1381, Oda, Bitchū province [part of Okayama prefecture], Japan—died June 9, 1459, Kyōto) was a priest-poet who is considered the last truly important tanka poet before the 20th century.

Shōtetsu was born into a middle-rank samurai family in the provinces but was taken by his family to Kyōto when he was a boy. He showed precocious ability at composing tanka. Probably by his father’s command, he became a Zen priest before he was 20, but he did not abandon tanka poetry. For him, as for the great Noh playwrights, a key term was yūgen, which he used to suggest deeply moving experiences “that cannot be expressed in words.” Shōtetsu often privileged expression and feeling over ordinary syntax, producing poems that remain challenging to read. His poetry is in the tradition of Fujiwara Teika, the great poet and theorist of the 12th and 13th centuries. He had little patience with poets of other schools, as shown in the opening sentence of his Shōtetsu monogatari (c. 1450; Conversations with Shōtetsu), a work of poetic criticism:

In this art of poetry, those who speak ill of Teika should be denied the protection of the gods and Buddhas and condemned to the punishments of hell.

Shōtetsu was an extraordinarily prolific poet. He lost more than 20,000 poems when his hermitage was destroyed by a fire, but he managed to write another 11,000 or so, which are preserved in his collection Sōkonshū (“Grass Roots Collection”).

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Poetry: First Lines

A sampling of Shōtetsu’s poems has been translated by Steven D. Carter in Unforgotten Dreams: Poems by the Zen Monk Shōtetsu (1997).