Personal Poetry Collections. Their Origin and Development Through the Heian Period

J APANESE poets have always been at pains not only to write and preserve their poetry, but also to collect it in an appropriate form, and the art of anthologizing or compiling poetry collections has been developed to a greater degree in Japan than in the West. Three basic types of collection were developed by the early poets: the imperial anthology, the private anthology, and the personal collection. ' The most obvious difference is between the anthologies, containing the works of many different poets, and the personal collection, containing the works of a single writer. An equally important distinction can be made between the public, formal mode of the imperial anthology and the private, unofficial character of the private anthology and the personal collection. The imperial anthology was compiled at the direct request of an emperor or retired emperor and received official imperial approval upon completion. Such was the enormous prestige of imperial sponsorship that these anthologies became the dominating form and overshadowed all other types of collection from the appearance of the first one, Kokinwakashfi,2 in 905 until the decline of court poetry in the fifteenth century. They have formed the focus of critical and scholarly attention to the virtual exclusion of any other type of poetry collection.3 They are perhaps well enough known to need no further description here. We should, however, remind ourselves of their intricate and highly formalized structure, in which poems are arranged not according to poet or period, but under formal categories: nature poems are grouped to follow the order of the seasons, love poems follow the course of a love affair, and every