Introduction
Kokoro no Hana[1] is an epoch-making treatise, in which the thesis is the same he had held before he met Shiki—that the essential function of poetry is not intellectual but emotional. Good poetry is not the result of an outpouring of personal emotion, but an expression of thought and feeling realized through a set of objects, a situation, or a chain of events. Hence he stresses the utmost importance of the faculty of seeing things as they really are, apart from imposed conventions, and concentration of mind as the necessary means of gaining accurate and precise expression. Japanese poetry since the Kohin-shu[2] had degenerated into a slavish following of set conventions and formalized technique. Love was always cruel, the zephyr always melted the nightingale’s frozen tears, and the silvery dewdrops were always jewels. Shiki fought against and successfully tore down the accepted structure of poetic theory and practice, but he was too ill to begin any reconstruction, and the task of providing a new technique and a new convention fell to Sachio. What makes his criti-
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