At the turn of the twentieth-century, Ishikawa Takuboku took Japan's ancient, highly formal poetic tradition and turned it to the purposes of an impassioned sensibility in a rapidly modernizing world. Beginning with poems rich in childhood sorrow and wonder, he progressed in his short life to a poetry of searing objectivity and miraculous self-knowing. Before dying of tuberculosis, Takuboku achieved in his poems a kind of Buddhist awakening, observing by their means the emptiness of self in a riveting and heartbreaking world. On Knowing Oneself Too Well offers, in Tamae K. Prindle's lucid...
At the turn of the twentieth-century, Ishikawa Takuboku took Japan's ancient, highly formal poetic tradition and turned it to the purposes of an impas...
