You might say that calligraphy is a personalization of an abstraction. The conventional written element is an abstraction of a sound or a word, which the calligrapher reformulates so as to express some unique, idiosyncratic quality. The poems that fill most of Koetsu's scrolls and cards come from a group of Japanese anthologies that date back to the tenth to twelfth centuries, to Heian times. Everything depends on the power of suggestion. Give no account, then, Of exactly what you saw In this dream on a night in spring.
Some poems contain a single, bursting image.
What Koetsu's calligraphy offered was a response to the poem, an interpretation that gave unexpected weights and emphases to familiar texts, and was in this sense perhaps more like a singer's interpretation of a lied by Schubert or Wolf than anything in the visual arts of the West.