A STUDY OF THE WARTIME POEMS OF TAKAHASHI SHINKICHI: WRITING BETWEEN DADA AND ZEN
A STUDY OF THE WARTIME POEMS OF TAKAHASHI SHINKICHI: WRITING BETWEEN DADA AND ZEN

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I discussed Takahashi Shinkichi's worldview and his view of language, focusing on his wartime poems in “Kirishima”, “Visiting Shrines”, and “Yamatoshimane”, poems written while he found himself caught in a conflict between his private self and his public self. Takahashi has been recognized for the singularity of his schizophrenic style of writing in his prewar poems and for his worldwide reputation as a Zen poet in the postwar period. However, the number of studies on his wartime poems is still very limited. In this paper I focused on his wartime poems to feature him as a poet who wrote pro-war poems, and from this perspective, I contemplated his bewilderment, the suffocating tension he experienced, and his abandoning communication through language. In the words publicly written in accordance with the contemporary discourse, the author’s personal desire to put his own comments, not ready-made ideas, to express his own feelings, can sometimes be seen. The poetic blank caused by this conflict is one of the premises on which Takahashi stood during the wartime period.

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