The Poetics of Japanese Verse

Leading literary scholar and critic Koji Kawamoto examines traditional Japanese poetry and shows how the deceptively simple metrics of seven and five syllables packs information and intense emotional content into a short space. The book also provides an overview of the development of the "waka" and "haiku" forms, using hundreds of examples from ancient to modern poets to illustrate the ways in which meaning and image are transmitted by traditional metric forms.