Yūgure Maeda

Yūgure Maeda (前田 夕暮 Maeda Yūgure; 1883–1951) was a Japanese tanka poet.

Yūgure Maeda was born on 27 July 1883. He was born in Minamiyana Village, Ōsumi District (modern-day Hadano City), Kanagawa Prefecture. His real name was Yōzō Maeda (前田 洋造 Maeda Yōzō).

He dropped out of middle school without graduating. In 1904 he moved to Tokyo and became a student of the tanka poet Saishū Onoe.

He died in 20 April 1951.

Most of Maeda's early tanka compositions were submitted to a variety of literary magazines and were rejected without a second word. He was encouraged by Saishū Onoe, writer of a poetry column for the periodical Shinsei (新声), to keep up his efforts, however. Maeda and Bokusui Wakayama were among the first poets to join Onoe's Shazensō-sha (車前草社) when it was founded in 1905.

The poets of the Shazensō-sha were insistent of simplicity and clarity of expression, in opposition to the poets associated with important magazine Myōjō. Maeda was one of the most critical of what he saw as the excessive romanticism of the Myōjō poets.

In 1906, Maeda founded his own poetic society, the Hakujitsu-sha (白日社).

In 1924, he was joined by Hakushū Kitahara, Toshiharu Kinoshita, Chikashi Koizumi, Zenmaro Toki and others in forming a group to publish a new literary magazine, Nikkō, which was to be purely devoted to Modernism. He took his first aeroplane ride in 1929, inspiring him to write in a more colloquial fashion — he felt the experience could not be described in traditional language. He continued to write unconventional tanka for fifteen years after this.

Maeda was an exceptionally prolific poet, and more than 40,000 of his tanka survive, but he published very little of this during his lifetime.

Literary historian and critic Donald Keene compared Kubota's poetry to that of Akiko Yosano, ironically one of the targets of Maeda's criticism.