Yūgure Maeda

Yūgure Maeda was born on 27 July 1883.[1] He was born in Minamiyana Village, Ōsumi District (modern-day Hadano City), Kanagawa Prefecture.[2] His real name was Yōzō Maeda (前田 洋造 Maeda Yōzō).[2]

He dropped out of middle school without graduating.[3] In 1904 he moved to Tokyo[4] and became a student of the tanka poet Saishū Onoe.[5]

He died in 20 April 1951.[1]

Most of Maeda's early tanka compositions were submitted to a variety of literary magazines and were rejected without a second word.[6] He was encouraged by Saishū Onoe, writer of a poetry column for the periodical Shinsei (新声), to keep up his efforts, however.[6] Maeda and Bokusui Wakayama were among the first poets to join Onoe's Shazensō-sha (車前草社) when it was founded in 1905.[6]

The poets of the Shazensō-sha were insistent of simplicity and clarity of expression, in opposition to the poets associated with important magazine Myōjō.[6] Maeda was one of the most critical of what he saw as the excessive romanticism of the Myōjō poets.[3]

In 1906, Maeda founded his own poetic society, the Hakujitsu-sha (白日社).[7]

In 1924, he was joined by Hakushū Kitahara, Toshiharu Kinoshita, Chikashi Koizumi, Zenmaro Toki and others in forming a group to publish a new literary magazine, Nikkō, which was to be purely devoted to Modernism.[8] He took his first aeroplane ride in 1929, inspiring him to write in a more colloquial fashion — he felt the experience could not be described in traditional language.[8] He continued to write unconventional tanka for fifteen years after this.[8]

Maeda was an exceptionally prolific poet, and more than 40,000 of his tanka survive,[6] but he published very little of this during his lifetime.[6]

Literary historian and critic Donald Keene compared Kubota's poetry to that of Akiko Yosano, ironically one of the targets of Maeda's criticism.[3]