“In this art of poetry, those who speak ill of Teika should be denied the protection of the gods and Buddhas and condemned to the punishments of hell.” So opens the fifteenth-century poetic miscellany Shtetsu monogatari (Conversation with Shtetsu), voicing one poet's extreme expression of an awareness of Fujiwara no Teika's crucial role in the formation of medieval poetry and poetics. The son of Fujiwara no Shunzei, Teika was the leading figure among the poets who in the last decades of the twelfth century developed a highly allusive, richly imagistic, and often syntactically complex style of poetry. Compositions in this style, called at times yugen or yen, comprise the core of the contemporary poems anthologized in the Shin kokinshu (New Collection of Ancient and Modern Times, 1206) and have won for the collection recognition as one of the greatest anthologies of Japanese poetry. Teika was among the six compilers...