Waka (poetry)

Tanka (hereafter referred to as waka) consist of five lines (句, ku, literally "phrases") of 5-7-5-7-7 on or syllabic units.

瓜食めば 子ども思ほゆ 栗食めば まして偲はゆ 何処より 来りしものそ 眼交に もとな懸りて 安眠し寝さぬ Uri hameba Kodomo omohoyu Kuri hameba Mashite shinowayu Izuku yori Kitarishi monoso Manakai ni Motona kakarite Yasui shi nasanu When I eat melons My children come to my mind; When I eat chestnuts The longing is even worse.

[English translation by Edwin Cranston] In the early Heian period (at the beginning of the 10th century), chōka was seldom written and tanka became the main form of waka.

Under influence from other genres such as kanshi, novels and stories such as Tale of Genji and even Western poetry, it developed gradually, broadening its repertoire of expression and topics.

He was a waka poet who belonged to the youngest generation represented in the anthology; indeed, the last volume is dominated by his poems.

Nukata no Ōkimi, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, Yamabe no Akahito, Yamanoue no Okura, Ōtomo no Tabito and his son Yakamochi were the greatest poets in this anthology.

This severing of ties, combined with Japan's geographic isolation, essentially forced the court to cultivate native talent and look inward, synthesizing Chinese poetic styles and techniques with local traditions.

[citation needed] Roughly half a century after the compilation of the Kokinshū, in 951, Emperor Murakami commanded the Five Men of the Pear Chamber to compile the Gosen Wakashū, in addition to preparing kundoku readings for the Man'yōshū, which by that time was already difficult for even educated Japanese to read.

The courtly poetry scenes were historically dominated by a few noble clans and allies, each of which staked out a position.

By this period, a number of clans had fallen by the wayside, leaving the Reizei and the Nijō families; the former stood for "progressive" approaches, the varied use of the "ten styles" and novelty, while the latter conservatively hewed to already established norms and the "ushin" (deep feelings) style that dominated courtly poetry.

As momentum and popular interest shifted to the renga form, the tanka style was left to the Imperial court.

It was a system on how to analyze the Kokin Wakashū and included the secret (or precisely lost) meaning of words.

Studying waka degenerated into learning the many intricate rules, allusions, theories, and secrets, so as to produce tanka that would be accepted by the court.

But in the Edo-period waka itself lost almost all of its flexibility and began to echo and repeat old poems and themes.

Newly created haikai no renga (of whose hokku, or opening verse, haiku was a late 19th-century revision) was the favored genre.

It was called kyōka (狂歌), mad poem, and was loved by intellectual people in big cities like Edo and Osaka.