戦争詩の系譜とラジオの台頭 - 野口米次郎の戦争詩をめぐって -

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the modern history of Japanese war-poetry and radio-broadcasts involving YONE Noguchi. There is a long history of war-poetry in the West, but war poetry was not common in traditional Japanese poetry in the pre-modern period. In other word, Japanese war-poetry is a modern genre, which was approached through the reception of Western literary thoughts and methods. This article firstly verifies that Noguchi’s article, written in 1918, which served as an introduction on the emergence of English war-poetry during WWI and argued its innovative point upon the English poetic history. Noguchi’s explanation about the poetical modernization and the role of poets was handed down to the Japanese of the next generation: such as ‘the Grass-roots poets' (民衆詩派) and the modernists of the 1930-1940’s. Secondly, this study focuses on the fact that the mass production of war-poetry went out over the pervasiveness of radio-broadcasts. From the beginning, it was operated as a national public affair, or the propaganda agent for public strategy. As one anonymous author of the magazine ‘Bungei-shunjyu' (文芸春秋) has critically argued, the purpose and role of radio was not only ‘news reporting’, but ‘education’, ‘consolation’. This study, thirdly, approaches that of the self-understanding and psychological repression of poets in the wartime years, and analyzes the possibility of expression while under national control, through concerns of the obverse & reverse sides of radio-broadcasting.