Beyond shasei, beyond nature: Idealism and allusion in the poetry of Shimazaki Toson, Doi Bansui, and Yosano Akiko

This dissertation examines the early poetry of Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943), Doi Bansui (1871-1952), and Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), three writers who took Japanese Romantic poetry to its height in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Instead of following the realistic trend of shasei (sketching from life), each of these poets pursued a lyricism that sought ideals of nature and mined poetic allusions from classical Japanese, classical Chinese, and European Romantic predecessors. Their conceptual and intertextual commitments thus go beyond shasei and beyond nature.;The introduction analyzes the discursive context surrounding concepts of nature and Romanticism, the traditional use of citation and allusion in Japanese poetics, and the development of shintaishi (new-style poetry) alongside tanka in the Meiji period (1868-1912).;Chapter one investigates poems from Shimazaki Toson's Seedlings (Wakanashu, 1897) that concern the poetic speaker's absorption in and alienation from wild nature. The nature of Toson's poems, however, is always an idealized landscape viewed through a traditional cultural prism, mediated by poetic allusion, and described in refined diction; indeed, that is why nature can be a source of happiness and completeness.;Chapter two takes up poetic meditations on the ideal role of the poet in relation to nature in Doi Bansui's Nature Has Feelings (Tenchi ujo, 1899). In the ironic stance of non-poets, Bansui's poetic speakers curate the insights of a global gallery of poetic predecessors. These poets' mystifications of nature in the end are hopeless, but the remaining palimpsest of lost ideals is itself an inspiring mix of shadows and echoes. The poems thus suggest that the ideal aim of the poet is neither realism nor idealism, but a course that charts and preserves the fissures between the two.;Chapter three examines how the tanka in Yosano Akiko's Tangled Hair (Midaregami, 1901) use supernatural symbolism to entangle the modern discourse of love (ren'ai) as a spiritual ideal with classical poetic tropes. Deities, sin, and other supernatural and religious elements are prominent in Akiko's poetry, but they have largely been overlooked by scholars who seek biographical explanations for her verses. By invoking multiple, often contradictory ideals of the natural and the supernatural, Akiko made the wavering possibility of liberation from traditional sexual mores seem dangerous and exciting, while her allusive yet passionate diction brought about a revolution within the tanka form.;A brief concluding chapter ties together the poetic strategies of Toson, Bansui, and Akiko through the meditations on nature and art by the narrator of Natsume Soseki's (1867-1916) novel Kusamakura (1906), then considers how Romantic lyric poetry gave way to Symbolism and Naturalism. An appendix presents English translations of shintaishi from Toson's Seedlings and Bansui's Nature Has Feelings, most of which have never been published in translation.