The course is an introduction to the critical analysis and translation of representative verses from a thousand years of traditional Japanese poetry, a genre that reaches from early declarative work redolent of an even earlier oral tradition to medieval and Early Modern verses evoking exquisitely differentiated emotional states and seasonal transitions via complex rhetoric and literary allusion. We will be focusing on three great collections of poetry: Man'yôshû (last dated poem, 759), Kokinshû (905), and Shinkokinshû (ca. 1205), linked verse (renga), and the late seventeenth century haibun of Bashô. All works will be read in classical Japanese. Supplementary discussions on literary and cultural background will be included.