Embodied Poems

Premodern Japanese visual culture had a surprising number of genres that involved the embodiment of waka in human forms. Byōbu-uta, or “screen poems,” were a very important genre in the development of what is known as the Kokinshū-style in the late nineth century and beyond. Here, poets would often assume the persona or personae of human figures depicted in a landscape painted on a folding screen and compose poems from their perspective.