Page 14 - The DCO Anthology of Haiku Booklet

A Brief History Of Haiku
The haiku originated in Japan more than 300 years ago, and has been adapted into English and other languages since the early 20th century. In English, a haiku is traditionally made up of three lines, of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. The poem features a juxtaposition of two distinct images or thoughts, and in its purest form, should include a seasonal reference to nature. Imagery is usually dominant over direct statement of ideas; the reader is expected to make their own connections between the poem’s images
The haiku derives from an even older form of Japanese poetry called renga. A renga is a collaboratively written poem, with participating poets taking turns adding a new stanza to the poem. Each stanza of a renga is in what we now think of as haiku form, and the opening stanza of the poem is called the hokku. Steven D. Carter’s Haiku Before Haiku looks at the pre-haiku history of the renga.
In the late 17th century, the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) began to publish his hokku independently of the renga to which they were attached, beginning the transition from the hokku as part of a longer work to the haiku as a work complete in itself. Bashō is regarded as the first great master of haiku, and his work continues to be read today.
Other early masters of the form include Yosa Buson (1716-1783), who was a master of the art from known as haiga, in which hokku stanzas are combined with an accompanying painting; and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), a devoted Buddhist who wrote more than 20,000 haiku.
Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) was the first poet to formally separate his haiku poems from the context of a larger renga, and the first to call them haiku, an abbreviated form of the Japanese phrase for “stanza of a renga.” Most of the haiku from before Shiki’s era were still formally hokku, first stanzas of longer rengas, but were rarely referred to as such after the word “haiku” was adopted.
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