"What is Poetry?"

The phrase shi towa nani ka (what is poetry?) has recurred frequently in the rhetoric of modern Japanese poetry and poetics, and tracing its history invites a reliance on multiple methodologies in the early twenty-first century. The present study juxtaposes and analyzes critical and poetic works that appear as results in a search for the phrase shi towa nani ka in the database of the National Diet Library of Japan. These various works, as this essay finds, generally do not refer to each other explicitly: despite the common textual element, it seems there is little connection—whether via allusion, citation, critical rejoinder, or appreciative affirmation—between the search results. This assertion, however, invites methodological reflections: should one expect database search results to be discursively related? It should be emphasized that the present study is not an essay in distant reading—the approach to data here is not obviously algorithm-driven, nor is the dataset "big" (although the essay includes reflections on the subject of scale). Nor is it a concept history in the usual acceptation of that term. But the approach taken here—defining and analyzing a corpus of texts that share a common phrasal element—has implications for a distant reading approach to conceptual history, a topic broached in the final paragraphs of the essay.