Shotetsu

"As if to say— "Isn't it true for men, as well: that the more the words, the less they are of value?"— the cuckoo does not call again."

"When I look upon the rich sheen of summer hairs in my new brush, I am saddened by a deer drawn at night to a hunter's torch."

"I had forgotten— as I kept on forgetting to remind myself that those who vow to forget are the ones who can't forget."

"All these images from a world of long ago— of what good are they? Pine winds, come—please blow away these unforgotten dreams."

"Even in one’s sleep, it is dreams of this world one sees, and of no other; just as there is no dawning here that brings true awakening."

"If one continues to compose poems of the sort that everyone else considers good, one must remain forever at that ordinary level. On the other hand, when one writes poems whose essence is profound and difficult, others fail to understand them, and this is frustrating."

"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."

"The annals of Japanese literary history abound with stories of suffering literati. [...] None of these, however, seems to have borne more grief than the Zen monk Shotetsu (1381-1459), [...] For Shotetsu was not once but thrice stricken: first, by the loss of all of the poems of his first thirty years—more than 30,000 of them—in a fire that destroyed his residence in 1432, at the age of fifty-two; second, by the confiscation of his estate revenues by an angry shogun at around the same time; and lastly by the refusal of his rivals to allow him any representation whatsoever in the only imperially commissioned poetic anthology of his time, the Shin shokuko-kinshū of 1439."