SOURCE: “Matsuo Bashō: The Poetic Spirit, Sabi, and Lightness,” in Zeami, Bashō, Yeats, Pound: A Study in Japanese and English Poetics, Mouton & Co., 1965, pp. 35-64.
In the following excerpt, Ueda argues that Bashō's poetic concepts of “fragrance,” “revelation,” “reflection,” and “lightness”—which concern how the “poetic spirit” can be revealed in a poem—are manifestations of the poet's ideas about life, including his religious pessimism, pragmatic optimism, feudalistic conventionalism, and bourgeois liberalism.
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