Dew on the Grass

The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa

By Makoto Ueda

2004

First Published

4.55

Average Rating

194

Number of Pages

5H55M

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Part of Series

Brill's Japanese Studies Library book cover 1

Brill's Japanese Studies Library

Series · 43 books

By Petra Schmidt, Martin Collcutt, Harold Bolitho, and more

This book sketches the life and poetry of Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), a Japanese poet popularly known as one of the Three Pillars of Haiku. While Basho with his mystic asceticism and Buson with his romantic aestheticism immeasurably enriched the haiku tradition, it was Issa who, with his bold individualism and all-embracing humanism, helped to modernize the form to a degree matched by no other poet. Based on the most recent scholarship, the book attempts to identify the sources of his originality in terms of his long checkered life. It traces his growth and maturity by examining his motherless childhood, struggling youth in Edo, wanderings in western Japan, restless existence as a haiku master, return home to Kashiwabara, three brief marriages, and last years as an old poet.

Avg Rating

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Author

Makoto Ueda

Author · 4 books

Makoto Ueda (上田真 Ueda Makoto, born 1931) is a professor emeritus of Japanese literature at Stanford University. He earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1961. In 2004-2005 he served as the honorary curator of the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library in Sacramento, California. He was given that honor "in recognition of Ueda’s many decades of academic writing about haiku and related genres and his leading translations of Japanese haiku." The library added that "Ueda has been our most consistently useful source for information on Japanese haiku, as well as our finest source for the poems in translation, from Bashô to the present day." His work on female poets and 20th century poets "had an enormous impact". He is an author of numerous books about Japanese literature and in particular Haiku, Senryū, Tanka, and Japanese poetics. (from Wikipedia)