Kakinomoto hitomaro biography of albert

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (柿本 人麻呂; c. 662 – 708 or 710 C.E.), was a Japanese poet of the Nara period who featured prominently in the oldest extant Japanese poetry anthology, Man'yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves), particularly in Volumes One and Two.

Kakinomoto hitomaro biography of albert

He has been venerated by the Japanese since earliest times, and was Japan's first great literary figure. Hitomaro lived and wrote poetry at a time when Japan was emerging from a pre-literate society into a literate and civilized one.

He combined the qualities of primitive song with new rhetoric and structural techniques (some of which may have been adapted from Chinese poetry), and wrote about sophisticated new subjects and concerns with an attitude of seriousness and importance.

He wrote in the two major Japanese poetic forms of his day, tanka (or mijikauta, 'short poems') and choka (or nagauta, 'long poems').

As an official poet to the court of three successive ruler