Haiku, a poem of 17 syllables, is derived from haikai or hokku, the two opening lines (or upper verse) of comic linked verse, a pleasant literary entertainment that evolved from the earlier form renga used extensively by Zen Buddhist monks during the 15^th and 16^th centuries. During the Tokugawa or Edo period, haiku achieved great popularity and success, led by the haiku master Basho (pseudonym of Matsuo Munefusa, CE/AD 1644-1694). In his youth Basho was a samurai, but after 1666, he devoted his life to writing poetry. The structure of his haiku reflects the simplicity of his meditative life.  When he felt the need for solitude, he withdrew to his basho-an, a hut made of plantain leaves (basho)—hence his pseudonym.  Influenced by Zen Buddhism, Basho infused a mystical quality into much of his verse and attempted to express universal themes through simple natural images—from the harvest moon to the fleas in his cottage.  Like Sen-no-Rikyu, perfecter of the tea ceremony, Basho aimed in his haiku to achieve the aesthetic qualities of wabi and sabi: a sense of the beauty

A Zen Buddhist lay-priest, Basho took excursions to remote regions in the last ten years of his life, composing as the mood struck him, so that much of his later poetry is set within travel accounts. These journeys provided rich experiences and images to inspire his contemplative poetry.  He is revered as the greatest of Japanese poets for his sensitivity and profundity and is particularly noted for his Oku-no-hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North, 1694; trans. 1966), filled with sensitive prose passages as well as wonderful haiku. 

In addition to Basho, other important haiku poets include Yosa Buson, whose haiku express his experience as a painter; and Kobayashi Issa, a poet of humble origin, who drew his haiku material from everyday village life.  Since Basho’s time, haiku has become one of the most widely known and appreciated of Japan’s literary forms in the West. The precise and concise nature of haiku influenced the early 20th-century Anglo-American poetic movement known as imagism*.  Today the writing of haiku is still practiced by thousands of Japanese, as well as by poets throughout the world, and outstanding haiku are published annually in countless periodicals devoted to the art. 

"Japanese poets and painters were [and still are] capable of complex, large-scale works, but it has been their particular genius to capture the essence of a sense, a feeling, or a momentary insight in the most succinct terms possible" (Addiss, Yamamoto, and Yamamoto 7).  Haiku can be described as the distilled essence of poetry--brief, compressed, and suggestive.  But the act of writing haiku has both aesthetic and spiritual dimensions.  The influence of Zen Buddhism, "which stresses intense focus on the here and now,"  is imbued in the content, form, and aesthetics of haiku (Addiss, Yamamoto, and Yamamoto 7). Haiku is not just an art form, but a spiritual discipline, like yoga or Zen Buddhist meditation. In its highest realization, haiku is a poem of extraordinary aesthetic and spiritual beauty that captures a profound and balanced moment of insight, resolution and order.  Basho was reported to have said:  "He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet.  He who attains to ten is a master."

The richness and reward for haiku readers, according to Addiss, Yamamoto, and Yamamoto, lies in its suggestiveness

(1)  Haiku is brief and compressed, and suggests rather than explains.  The aesthetic and spiritual "discipline" of haiku begins by the poet trying to adhere to its requirements of length, lines, and syllables, as well as to its other poetic conventions of form and content.  What a haiku poet has to say about a specific, momentary observed aspect of nature (including human nature), must be condensed, distilled, and disciplined into three lines, each of a prescribed number of syllables, for a total of just 17 syllables.  Note Well: Seventeen syllables is the average number of syllables that can be uttered in one breath.

A haiku poem of 17 syllables is composed of three lines [or word groups], usually unrhymed, of these number of syllables:

Some haiku can seem deceptively simple at first glance--too short, simple and everyday, some might argue, to be "great" poetry.  But haiku's richness and the reward for haiku readers, lies in its brief and compressed suggestiveness, engaging the reader's participation in ways that longer poetry cannot do.  According to Addiss, Yamamoto, and Yamamoto, haiku "invites readers to complete the meanings for themselves.  It is the involvement of the readers that makes haiku such a rich expression of experience.  Rather than being told what to think and feel, we are asked to share in the creation of a mood, a moment of nature, a human insight." (7).

(2) The Haiku Moment.  Ideally, a haiku poem is written in response to—if not in the throes of, then in the immediate afterglow of--a “haiku moment.”  Modern Japanese tourists in foreign countries, especially in the West, have often been caricatured laden down with photographic equipment and endlessly taking photographs--snapshots to remember moments of their traveling experience by.  But this Western stereotype reflects a deeper impulse, which has its origins in Zen Buddhism.  Basho set the example well before the age of photography gave people a more modern means.  Haiku could also be characterized as a kind of “snapshot” of experience—a means to capture a fleeting but memorable moment—a “haiku moment”—on one’s life’s travels. 

how silent and still!
into the heart of the rocks sinks
the cicada’s shrill
--Basho

One—especially Western ones such as those of us in this class—do not normally just stumble into a “haiku moment” —though that occasionally happens when one experiences an unforgettable moment of transcendent realization.  Rather, most of us need to discipline and prepare ourselves, and cultivate opportunities in order to achieve a state of “readiness" for a “haiku moment.”  The authors of A Haiku Garden state that it is the “vision that creates haiku.  What is important is seeing clearly and not limiting the possibilities of meaning by defining them too closely….Can you create a haiku from watching an insect on a flower, from transplanting a bulb, from sensing the rain falling on dry ground?…the simplest of arts may express most deeply the unity that Thoreau felt when he wrote, ‘I am a rock.’  If we can release ourselves from sense of self and focus our attention in the same way, who knows what we may become?"  (

• Readiness for an experience for its own sake.  "Learn the pine from the pine" advised Basho.  --through concentrated observation and meditation on the thing itself for what it is in its own nature. 

• The single moment of “Ah!” the length of a breath, when the “speaking impassioned object” seizes the observer [poet].
  As noted above, 17 syllables is the average number of syllables that can be uttered in one breath, the duration of the state of "Ah-ness." Ideally, the words of a haiku can be spoken in one breath, the sequence and rhythm of the words shaping their delivery as the poet exhales, the haiku moment and the poet's vision completed at the end of the breath and of the haiku. 

• One goes into the heart of created things and becomes one with nature*. 
  *Note Well:  Haiku are not "nature poems" in the usual Western sense.  Nature is the subject of haiku, but the traditional Japanese concept of "nature" encompasses human activities and affairs, because people are also part of "nature."

(3)  Haiku is a poetry of objects and physical sensation:  it names nouns directly and concretely, and evokes sensory experiences of sight, smell, taste, touch, and/or sound.  The haiku poet must concentrate and meditate upon the observed object, alone, in itself, in nature or in its found/natural state.  Basho advised, “Learn the pine from the pine,” through concentrated observation and meditation on the thing itself for what it is in its own nature. 

Typically, the object observed in a moment of realization is not to be likened to something else.  Unlike Western poetry, well-realized haiku does not achieve its suggestiveness by using metaphor, simile or other Western fanciful figures and flights of language.  Imagine yourself a painter, who must observe very closely the object to be represented, and then somehow find visual means to represent all that s/he experiences of a subject, an experience, a mood.  The medium of the haiku poet is words, rather than paint, but there are restrictions on the means of expression that govern the highest achievement in this genre of poetry. 

The haiku poet strives to quicken her/his senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, feeling so that they join, infuse, become one with the object observed: in this fleeting but supreme moment of union--which requires that one lose her/himself entirely in this moment of existence-- one can gain, however paradoxically it may sound, a moment of sudden realization of true and transcendent “reality.”  (Yes, I know, this explanation in the paltry medium of English words probably makes little “logical” sense.).  The haiku poet experiences the object, the moment, the mood, through her/his senses—of sight, taste, touch, sounds, and/or smell. Await that moment of realization when the object observed and the moment experienced can be pared down to their essence, expressed in the absolute minimum of necessary words that capture its nature realized, concretely through one’s senses. [Define "image" Cora!!]

Skillful haiku presents two contrasting images, but the poet does not explain how they are connected, nor reconcile any apparent contradictions.  These images operate upon each other to suggest a mood or emotion; but they intentionally leave multiple interpretations open to readers.

chrysanthemum fragrance
in the garden, the heel of
a broken sandal
--Basho

now the swinging bridge
is quieted with creepers …
like our tendrilled life
--Basho

now how dear to me
seems my father’s rage when I
broke the peony
--Tairo

  housecleaning day –
hanging a shelf in his own house
a carpenter
--Basho

a sunny spring day
people are doing nothing
in the small village
--Shiki Masaoka

Shiki Masaoka (1867-1902) wrote 18,000 haiku in his short life.  On September 20, 1895, Shiki Masaoka and his friend Yanagihara Kyokudo made an excursion to Ishite-ji, the famous 51^st Temple of Pilgrimage to the 88 Sacred Places of Shikoku.  Then, and still today, at most Buddhist temples, as well as at Shinto shrines in Japan, a small sum of money will buy you a fortune-telling paper.  An attendant shakes an oblong box containing a number of bamboo sticks until one stick emerges from a small hole in the top of the box.  The stick bears a number that dictates which paper is to be delivered to you, the patron.  On the paper are printed a picture of the deity to whom the temple or shrine is dedicated, and a prediction of your fortune, which is accepted as an oracle from the deity:  it can forecast on subject such as love and marriage, travel, finances, change of residence, health, length of life.

Our two young men, back in 1895, were sitting on a veranda of the temple’s Otsuya-do, a building where pilgrims may rest or stay overnight.  One of these fortune-telling papers drawn by someone else was carried on a breeze to Shiki’s side.  He picked it up and read it.  The paper foretold a very bad fortune: it said things like, “Misfortune overshadows your future…illness, long-lasting but not incurable.”  Since Shiki was ill, he took the omen very seriously and, as Kyokudo later testified, worried about it, half believing it and half not believing it.  Shiki afterwards wrote this haiku:

mi-no-ue ya
[mi-no-ue = “one’s fortune, fate, or lot in life”]

mi-kuji o hikeba
[mi-kuji = one’s “oracle” or fortune; hikeba = “to draw]

aki no kaze
[aki = “autumn”; kaze = “wind”]
--Shiki Masaokai

One translation into English:
"(Alas my) fortune;
drawing divine lots,
the autumn wind.”

A dark green haiku stone for Shiki bearing this haiku has been placed close to the temple’s Otsuya-do, where the ill-omened fortune paper drifted to Shiki Masaoka that day in 1895, seven years before his death.

Haiku of Shiki Masaoka (1867-1902): 
 http://mikan.cc.matsuyama-u.ac.jp/~shiki/sm/sm.html    [Sorry, Link is broken ~ CA]
Shiki and Ishite-ji: http://www.st.rim.or.jp/~beck/kametaro/Shiki-Ishiteji.html 

Sources & Resources for Further Reading:

NEED TO ADD THE REST OF THE SOURCES!!

Giroux, Joan. The Haiku Form.  Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1974.

Hisamatsu, Sen'ichi. Biographical Dictionary of Japanese Literature. Kodansha, 1976. Kato, Shuichi. A History of Japanese Literature. 3 vols. Kodansha, 1979-83.  Rpt. State Mutual, 1985.

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era. 2 vols. Boston: Holt, 1987. V.1: Nonfiction; V.2; Poetry, drama, and criticism. Preceded by: World Within Walls (Holt, 1976; Grove, 1979) covering 1600-1867.

Miner, Earl Roy, Hiroko Odagiri, and Robert E. Morrell. The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Morris, Ivan, ed. Dictionary of Selected Forms in Classical Japanese Literature.  New York: Columbia UP, 1966..

Seidensticker, Edward. Genji Days. Kodansha, 1978, 1984.

Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature.  Stanford: Stanford UP, 1976.

Yasuda, Kenneth.  The Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English, with Selected Examples.  1957.  Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1995.

URL of this webpage:  http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/haiku.htm