Two Poets, from an Album of Comic Verse

Two poets sit on facing pages, each paired with a verse in flowing script above him. The one at right lifts a folded fan; the one at left, in a gold-patterned robe, looks down in thought. These are celebrities of Edo's comic-poetry circles, portrayed in a deluxe album that ran through fifty such figures. Kyōden, signing as Kitao Masanobu, gives each poet a distinct posture and dress, so the book reads as a gallery of personalities as much as a poetry anthology. Portrait and text are printed on the same opening, to be read together. The whole object is a commercial book, sold to a public that followed these poets the way later readers followed novelists. Turn the page and the next pair appears, and the next.