History of Haiku: Origin, Basho, Shiki, English

Haiku began as the opening verse of a Japanese linked poem. It became a poem in its own right during the 1600s, took its modern name in the late 1800s, and reached English readers in the 1870s. Along the way it kept its brevity and lost most of its rules.

Here is how that happened, from the linked poems that came first to the open-form work in the archive of this journal.

Renga and the hokku

The story starts with linked verse. In a renga, poets took turns adding stanzas to a chain, each one answering the one before. The Haiku Society of America describes haikai as the popular style of Japanese linked verse that originated in the sixteenth century.

The first stanza of such a chain was the hokku. A hokku was usually written in a 5-7-5 pattern of Japanese sound units. Because it opened the chain, it was the stanza a poet could lift out and treat as a poem on its own, and that is exactly what happened.

Basho and the independent hokku

Matsuo Basho (1644 to 1694) is the central figure. From his time, the hokku began to appear as an independent poem. He took the pen name Basho around 1680, when disciples planted a banana tree, a basho, beside his hut. His most famous poem, composed in early 1686, is about a frog and an old pond.

In 1689 he traveled with a companion for about 150 days, and the prose account of that trip, The Narrow Road to the Interior, was published in 1702, after his death. He reportedly believed that his best work lay in linked verse rather than in single hokku. Even the 5-7-5 count was looser than people assume: one scholar who studied 1,012 of his hokku found that about 15 percent did not fit it. Strictly speaking, then, Basho wrote hokku. The word haiku was applied to them later.

Buson and Issa

Yosa Buson (1716 to 1784) was a painter first. Painting was his main income, and in his own day his paintings were more widely accepted than his poetry. Others shaped the form as well, among them Uejima Onitsura (1661 to 1738) and Fukuda Chiyo-ni (1703 to 1775).

Kobayashi Issa (1763 to 1827) wrote an enormous amount, more than 20,000 haiku, including about a thousand on small creatures such as fireflies, frogs, and fleas. His pen name, Issa, means roughly one cup of tea. Together with Basho and Buson, he is counted as one of the classical masters.

Shiki and the name haiku

Masaoka Shiki (1867 to 1902) renamed the standalone hokku haiku at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1892 he became haiku editor of the newspaper Nippon, and he used it to argue for realistic observation of nature over the puns and fantasies of the old school.

His reform did not break with tradition. He kept the 5-7-5 pattern and the season word, and he championed Buson as a model. The Haiku Society of America notes that the older use of hokku for what is now called haiku is generally obsolete.

Haiku arrives in English

The first haiku printed in English appeared in 1877, when William George Aston included three translations in a grammar of written Japanese. In 1904 the poet Yone Noguchi published an essay inviting American poets to try the form.

Ezra Pound's 1913 poem In a Station of the Metro was cut from thirty lines to two, and it became a landmark of Imagist poetry shaped by Japanese models. Later, R. H. Blyth's four-volume Haiku (1949 to 1952) and Harold G. Henderson's An Introduction to Haiku (1958) taught a generation of English readers what to look for.

English-language haiku in the twentieth century

American haiku became a community in the middle of the century. The Los Altos Writers' Roundtable, the first English-language haiku group in America, formed in 1956. The magazine American Haiku began in Platteville, Wisconsin, in 1963, and one of its poets, Nick Virgilio, broke 5-7-5 with very short poems. Richard Wright wrote about 4,000 haiku in 1959 and 1960.

The Haiku Society of America was founded in 1968, and Modern Haiku published its first issue in 1969. By 1973 the society noted that the norm in English was seventeen syllables, with a clear trend toward fewer. William J. Higginson's The Haiku Handbook (1985) proposed counting accented beats, two, three, and two, in place of syllables, and one-line haiku became more than an occasional exception from the late 1970s.

Open-form haiku and this archive

The society's current page says that poets writing in English abandoned syllable counting decades ago. That is the world this journal published in. Its guidelines looked only to the content of the poem, so the 18 issues hold strict 5-7-5 beside very short poems.

Mauricio Gonzalez's autumn poem, with its opening THE YELLOW LEAVES FALL, counts out to five, seven, and five. Sarah Clark Monagle's ends on SOUNDS GREEN and runs about eight syllables in all. Jessica Hoard's migration poem uses A BLADE OF GEESE, a fresh image in the Japanese tradition of looking closely at the season. Read more in the issues, or begin with autumn haiku.

AUTUMN

THE YELLOW LEAVES FALLAND SLOWLY FILL THE SPACE, WHERETHE SHADE USED TO BE

Mauricio Gonzalez
Issue #1, page 87

RAIN STILL

LEAVES CHANGEBUT THE RAIN STILLSOUNDS GREEN

Sarah Clark Monagle
Issue #3, page 23

MIGRATION

A BLADE OF GEESESLICE OPENTHE AUTUMN SKY

Jessica Hoard
Issue #17, page 18

Questions readers ask

Who invented haiku?

No single person did. Haiku grew out of the opening verse (hokku) of Japanese linked poems. Matsuo Basho (1644 to 1694) made the hokku an independent poem, and Masaoka Shiki later gave it the name haiku.

Who coined the word haiku?

Masaoka Shiki is credited with renaming the standalone hokku haiku at the end of the nineteenth century. Basho wrote hokku, and the word haiku was applied to his poems later.

When did haiku come to English?

The first haiku printed in English appeared in 1877 as translations. Original English-language haiku grew through the early twentieth century, and Ezra Pound's 1913 poem is often named as a landmark.

Who are the great haiku masters?

Basho, Buson, and Issa are the classical masters, and some critics add Shiki as a fourth.

Sources

Last reviewed November 2026. Poems are the work of the poets credited and link to their pages in the original issues.

Haiku by theme Online issues