In terms of the history of kanshi composition the Edo period is appropriately divided into two parts, with the first ending around 1780, when kanshi poets start to show a significant level of concern with national affairs and with Japan's growing contacts with the outside world. At the same time, other relatively well established trends begin to intensify, notably an interest in writing about mundane matters and popular culture. In any event, during Ogyu Sorai's lifetime kanshi production increased steadily, partly through his school's efforts to promote and liberate the genre but also because of social and demographic changes occurring in Japanese society. Private occasional poetry, typically composed in solitude, makes up a large segment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century kanshi, remaining a staple well beyond the Edo period. The principle of harnessing kanshi for political ends, espoused by the Tokugawa regime in the early seventeenth century but eventually eclipsed, had returned ones that were unimaginable a generation before.

In the Tokugawa period, poetry played an important role in the ethical and political philosophies of many Confucians in the Ancient Learning or Kogaku movement, such as Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai, who sought to recover the original meaning of Confucian texts, which they believed had been distorted by later commentaries. Poetry played a similar role for many scholars of Kokugaku or nativism, such as Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga, who advocated a purely native Japanese culture freed from Confucianism and other foreign influences. Sorai linked empathy to a political ideal of decentralized feudalism, which he saw as characteristic of ancient China up until the Zhou dynasty, and contrasted with the centralized bureaucracies of the Qin dynasty and later. In his later works Mabuchi put forth a philosophy of Japanese cultural superiority in which he claimed that Japan originally possessed a spontaneous social harmony and unity with nature that were lacking in China.