How to Write Poetry Like a Monster: Fiction as a Guide to Poetic Creativity in Early Modern Japan

Nov. 19, 2026, 5:30–7:00 p.m.

Location: Rockefeller Hall 300

Can poetic creativity be taught? What creative attitude makes for a good poem? Where does poetic authority come from? What role should originality play in poetic composition? Does intention matter in crafting a poem? Is there an ethics to poetic creativity? These questions, still relevant today, were hotly contested in eighteenth-century Japan: a time of profound transformation for waka, the archipelago’s most ancient and prestigious verse form.

In this talk, Professor David Atherton (Thorley D. Briggs 1953 Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University) examines the answers to these questions put forth by the polymathic writer, poet, and scholar Ueda Akinari (1734–1809), one of the early modern period’s most dynamic creative figures. Rather than elaborating his poetic theories in the traditional form of a treatise, Akinari couches them within works of fiction, in which they are voiced by alter egos such as famous poets of the past or uncanny gods and monsters. Focusing in particular on the story “The One-Eyed God,” and probing the connections the work draws between monstrosity, creativity, idiosyncrasy, and unconventionality (both textual and corporeal), Prof. Atherton shows how this fictional approach gives shape to creative dynamics for which no expository language yet existed. He will also show how the story’s intersection of monsters and poetry points to the complex—and uncannily modern—new pathways opened for authorship and creativity in the eighteenth century.

Sponsored by the Asian Studies Program and co-sponsored by the Departments of Chinese and Japanese, English, History, and the Medieval & Renaissance Studies Program.

This event is free and open to the public.