mid-Heian period · dates unknown (late 10th c.)Sone no Yoshitada

A mid-Heian poet known by his post as secretary of Tango province. Denied advancement and reputed to be eccentric, he was once thrown out of a retired emperor's outing to which he had come uninvited. His poetry, however, was strikingly original: he revived Man'yō vocabulary, used colloquial words and composed a sequence of poems for every day of the year. Scorned in his lifetime, he was later admired and counted among the Late Classical Thirty-Six Immortals, with some ninety poems in imperial anthologies.