A Short History of Haiku

The haiku is old and young at once, a form with centuries behind it that only got its name a little over a hundred years ago.

Before the name

Haiku grew out of renga, the linked verse composed by groups of poets in medieval Japan. The opening stanza of a renga, the hokku, was the one that set the season and the scene, and it came to be prized on its own. For centuries the poem we now call haiku lived as this opening verse.

Bashō

Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is the poet who gave the form its depth. He took the hokku out of the party game and made it a vehicle for a whole way of seeing, spare and attentive, touched by the Zen idea that a small thing fully seen contains everything. His frog and his old pond are still the first haiku most readers meet.

Buson and Issa

Two great poets followed. Yosa Buson (1716–1784) was also a painter, and his haiku are painterly and precise, full of color and clear scenes. Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828) wrote with warmth and grief and a rare tenderness toward small creatures, the snails and flies and sparrows most poets overlook.

Shiki and the name

It was Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) who coined the word haiku and argued that the opening verse should stand as an independent poem. He pushed the form toward direct observation of life as it is, and modern haiku begins with him.

Into English

In the twentieth century translators and poets carried haiku into English. Writers in the Imagist movement admired its compression, and by mid-century English-language haiku had become a living tradition of its own, with its own journals and its own debates about the count and the season word. Haiku Journal is part of that tradition, publishing new haiku in the 5-7-5 form since 2008.

For the form those centuries produced, see the haiku form and what is haiku; to tell it from its cousin, read haiku or senryu.