Although haikai no renga was central to the poetic practice of haikai poets throughout the Edo period, its status within the canon of Japanese literature has been problematic since Masaoka Shiki declared that it was not bungaku. 3 Although Shiki admitted that haikai no renga texts had “literary” elements, linked verse values change over unity so his final judgment was that it could not be consi...

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In 1968, in a remark as wise as it is learned, Professor George Clark wrote of The Battle of Maldon that “what the poet does not create does not exist even if history inspires his poem.” Readers of the poem have been mulling this over for forty years. The historical information the poem affords us has been subject, in some degree, to alteration by imagination, to the formulae of verse, and to t...