Matsuo Kinsaku, known as Basho, was a Zen monk who travelled across Japan during the Tokugawa era, teaching and writing more than a thousand haiku. He took his name from the wide-leafed banana tree (the basho tree) given by a disciple that shaded the hut where he lived in seclusion on the outskirts of Edo, now present-day Tokyo.
Basho is widely regarded as Japan's greatest poet, and is credited with revitalizing the haiku form when it was expiring from formal artificiality. His style, called shofu, is known for its sabi, or contented solitude, and wabi, or humble appreciation of the everyday or commonplace. While not bound by rules, his poems generally follow the traditional development of two elements divided by a kineji, or cutting word, the first element conveying a condition or situation, and the second a sudden perception or flashing insight.
In Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, Basho writes,
In this poor body, composed of one-hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.... All who achieve greatness in art -- Saigyo in traditional poetry, Sogi in linked verse, Sesshu in painting, Rikyu in tea ceremony -- possess one thing in common: they are one with nature.
(Drawn from On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, by Lucien Stryk.)
The old pond;
the frog.
Plop!
Dying cricket!
How he sings out
his life.
On a dead limb
squats a crow.
Autumn night.
No one
walks along this path
this autumn evening.
Turn to me
this autumn eve:
I, too, am a stranger.
The lillies!
The stems, just as they are,
the flowers, just as they are.
Fallen ill mid-journey ....
About the burned fields
fly my broken dreams.
Basho's deathbed haiku, spoken before sixty disciples.