Classical Japanese Poets

The poems collected here are the earliest voices of Japanese verse in this archive: ballads, love songs, elegies and short stanzas of the seventh to tenth centuries, the Nara and early Heian courts. Some carry the names of court poets, among them Hitomaro, Akahito, Okura, Sosei, Narihira and the Lady Komachi; many are anonymous, and a few are given only to a title or an editorial line. Because most of the named poets have just one to three pieces apiece, the archive gathers them under a single entry, and each poem's note gives its author exactly as the source prints it.

All the poems are in English by Basil Hall Chamberlain, taken from the 'Classical Poetry of Japan' section of the anthology Japanese Literature (The Colonial Press, 1900). Chamberlain turns the Japanese into rhymed English verse, so the five-and-seven-syllable counts of the originals are not kept; the Japanese long poems become ballad stanzas and the short poems become four-line stanzas. Dates here are approximate, as the volume gives none for its poets.