The History of Haiku

Japanese haiku is a rare thing in the world of poetry: a world-famous, universally beloved verse form, practiced both by serious poets and schoolkids. Its present-day popularity is especially incredible given its ancient history. In Haiku Before Haiku , Steven Carter, a professor of Japanese literature at Stanford, charts the emergence of haiku as an art-form, and offers new translations of 320 poems from the period in which haiku was developing out of an earlier form called hokku.

 

Matsuo Basho's "Frog Haiku," one of the earlier haiku poems, composed in 1686.
Haiku, for all its simplicity, grew out of a complex tradition of Japanese collaborative poetry called renga. In renga, Carter explains, a group of poets -- sometimes more than a dozen -- gather under the supervision of a renga master, or sosho. Each poet contributes a stanza in turn, with the sosho guiding composition by mandating the use of particular words or the exploration of certain topics. In one renga session, the poets might produce as many as 100 linked stanzas, which mutate over time to take the renga through different movements. The first verse of the renga, called a hokku, is identical to a modern haiku. {Via}