Passion and form, modernity and tradition in the Midaregami poems of Yosano Akiko

Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) gained fame as a poet, both in tanka and modern shintaishi form, as s wife of Yosano Tekkan, also a prominent poet and literary magazine editor, and as a feminist, pacifist and social reformer, author of many texts published in Seitō or Bluestocking magazine. Although through her lifetime she produced many thousands of tanka poems, her most succesful and most discussed collection of poetry was the first one, Midaregami or Tangled Hair, published in 1901. Being the first poet, and a female one, to use words like ”breasts” in the tanka, she scandalized and received harsh criticism from some literary figures of her time, and by others she was criticised for creating poems hard to comprehend. In the first half of 20th century her poems appeared to be full of passion and eroticism, her women were active and conscious of the beauty of their bodies and their sexuality. Yosano Akiko is still remembered as a scandalist and the creator of most assertive, passionate poetry, but how is this passion created? In this paper I will attempt to analyse the modernity and tradition in Yosano Akiko’s poems. In order to understand better the uniqueness of her poetic art, I will take into consideration her language and peculiarity of the versification of her poems.