Japanese poetry of the pre-Zen period has been handed to us primarily in a few famous collections. The first great anthology of Japanese poetry is the Manyoshu, a volume of verses from the middle of the eighth century. A glance through the Manyoshu shows that the earliest poets did not confine themselves to five-line verses, but indulged in longer verses on heroic subjects, known as _choka_. The tone, as Donald Keene has observed, is often more masculine than feminine, that is, more vigorous than refined. As sensibilities softened in the early part of the Heian era and native verse became the prerogative of women, while men struggled with the more "important" language of China, the feminine tone prevailed to such an extent that male writers posed as women when using the native script. The next great collection of verse, the Kokinshu, published in the tenth century, was virtually all five- line _waka _concerned with seasons, birds, flowers, and fading love, and embracing the aesthetic ideals of _aware_, _miyabi_, and _yugen_. As the aristocratic culture gradually lost control in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a new verse form, derived from the _waka_, came into being: _renga_. This form consisted of a string of verses in the repeated sequence of 5,7,5 and 7,7 syllables per line--in reality a related series of _waka _but with the difference that no two consecutive two-or three-line verse sequences could be composed by the same individual. At first this new form seemed to offer hope of freeing poets from the increasingly confining range of subject matter prescribed for the _waka_. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. Before long the _renga_ was saddled with a set of rules covering which verse should mention what season; at what point the moon, cherry blossoms, and the like should be noted; and so forth. Little creativity was possible under such restrictions. Versifying became, in fact, a party game much in favor with provincial _samurai_ and peasants alike in times. While the remaining Kyoto aristocrats tried to keep their _renga _in the spirit of the classical _waka_, with allusions to Chinese poems and delicate melancholy, the provincials threw _renga _parties whose only aesthetic concern was adherence to the rules of the game. During the Ashikaga age, _renga_ and sake parties were the most popular forms of entertainment, but _renga's _only genuine contribution to Japanese poetry was the use of the vernacular by provincial poets, which finally broke the stranglehold of Heian feminine aesthetics. By the beginning of the Momoyama era, linked verse had