Teika Quotes

“Although I heard From the outset that a meeting Can only mean to part, I gave myself to love for you Unconscious of the coming dawn.”
― Paul S. Atkins, Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet

“In general, Teika’s historical vision was negative and pessimistic. The words matsudai and masse (“final age” or “era”) appear many times in Meigetsuki in the context of disparaging references to Teika’s own time.”
― Paul S. Atkins, Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet

“He seems to have shared strongly a belief espoused by another acquaintance, Kamo no Chōmei, who wrote in the Hōjōki, “One should understand the current state of the world by comparing it with that of antiquity.”13”
― Paul S. Atkins, Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet

“At times Shunzei pressed his criticisms of Kenshō even further, when he claimed that parts of the Man’yōshū were vulgar, and that certain images contained it were frightening.”
― Paul S. Atkins, Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet

“Someone on the Right team ventured to criticize the phrase kusa no hara ‘grassy meadows’ in Yoshitsune’s poem. Shunzei implied that the phrase was sanctioned solely by virtue its inclusion in Genji monogatari, and that the critic failed to appreciate this because he had not read Genji.”
― Paul S. Atkins, Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet

“Kenshō, who also finished with a losing record (23-39-38), was so aggrieved by the decisions that he composed a lengthy tract, Kenshō chinjō (Kenshō’s rejoinder), in which he meticulously criticized several dozen of the judgments, with copious citations of poems from earlier anthologies, especially the Man’yōshū, in a legalistic attempt to cite precedents and thereby justify his usage of diction rejected by Shunzei.”
― Paul S. Atkins, Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet

“The job of the poet—which is somewhat quixotic or Sisyphean—is to express things that one may have sensed or felt but never put into words, and to show the reader a new way of perceiving the world and our experience living in it.”
― Paul S. Atkins, Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet