Systems and Expressions : In the Case of the New-Style Poetry(<Feature Articles>The Thirty-Eighth Conference of the Japanese)

Abstract

What kind of contradictions and conflicts are there in literature, when they are in conflict with the outer systems which can oppress human beings, and when the idea of what literature should be is changed? I've pursued this point in New-Style Poetry in the early years of Meiji, from the viewpoint of its plot and have discovered the structure of seven-and-five syllable meter, which unites the time consciousness latent in the season systems of the latter days and the evolutionalistic sense of time in the modern times. It was in Tokoku's "SoSyu no Shi" that the unity of the two different time senses was partly destroyed and put into dicord with each other.