Haiku
Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji or verbal caesura. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to parallel the three metrical phrases of Japanese haiku.
While difficult to precisely define its function, a kireji lends the verse structural support, effectively allowing it to stand as an independent poem. Depending on which cutting word is chosen, and its position within the verse, it may briefly cut the stream of thought, suggesting a parallel between the preceding and following phrases, or it may provide a dignified ending, concluding the verse with a heightened sense of closure.
In English, since kireji has no direct equivalent, poets sometimes use punctuation such as a dash or ellipse, or an implied break, to divide a haiku into two grammatical and imagistic parts.
The purpose is to create a juxtaposition, prompting the reader to reflect on the relationship between the two parts.
A haiku traditionally contains a kigo, a defined word or phrase which symbolizes or implies the season alluded to in the poem.
Among traditionalist Japanese haiku writers, kireji and kigo are considered requirements; yet, as noted above, kireji are not used in English. Kigo are not always included by modern writers of Japanese "free-form" haiku and some non-Japanese haiku.
Syllables or "on" in haiku
In contrast to English verse which is typically characterized by meter, Japanese verse counts sound units (moras), known as "on".
The word on is often translated as "syllable", but there are subtle differences between an "on" and an English-language "syllable". Traditional haiku consist of 17 on, in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively.
The word onji (音字; "sound symbol") is sometimes used in referring to Japanese sound units in English although this word is archaic and no longer current in Japanese. In Japanese, the on corresponds very closely to the kana character count (closely enough that moji (or "character symbol") is also sometimes used as the count unit).
One on is counted for a short syllable, an additional one for an elongated vowel, diphthong, or doubled consonant, and one for an "n" at the end of a syllable.
He continues to be revered as a saint of poetry in Japan, and is the one name from classical Japanese literature that is familiar throughout the world.
Time of Buson
Grave of Yosa Buson
The next famous style of haikai to arise was that of Yosa Buson (1716–1783) and others such as Kitō, called the Tenmei style after the Tenmei Era (1781–1789) in which it was created. Issa made the genre immediately accessible to wider audiences.
Shiki's revisions
Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) was a reformer and revisionist.
He favored the painterly style of Buson and particularly the European concept of plein-air painting, which he adapted to create a style of haiku as a kind of nature sketch in words, an approach called shasei, literally ‘sketching from life’. He popularized his views by verse columns and essays in newspapers.
Hokku up to the time of Shiki, even when appearing independently, were written in the context of renku.
Being agnostic, he also separated it from the influence of Buddhism, with which hokku had very often been tinged. And finally, he discarded the term "hokku" and proposed the term haiku as an abbreviation of the phrase "haikai no ku" meaning a verse of haikai, although the term predates Shiki by some two centuries, when it was used to mean any verse of haikai. Haiga began as haiku added to paintings, but included the calligraphic painting of haiku via brushstrokes, with the calligraphy adding to the power of the haiku.
It was Buson who illustrated Bashō's famous travel journal, Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior). Early Western scholars such as Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) and William George Aston were mostly dismissive of hokku's poetic value.
Amy Lowell made a trip to London to meet Pound and find out about haiku. In 1949, with the publication in Japan of the first volume of Haiku, the four-volume work by Blyth, haiku were introduced to the post-war world.
Blyth's History of Haiku (1964) in two volumes is regarded as a classical study of haiku. Yasuda's theory includes the concept of a "haiku moment" based in personal experience, and provides the motive for writing a haiku.
His notion of the haiku moment has resonated with haiku writers in North America, even though the notion is not widely promoted in Japanese haiku.
Henderson
In 1958, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashô to Shiki by Harold G. After World War Two, Henderson and Blyth worked for the American Occupation in Japan and for the Imperial Household, respectively, and their shared appreciation of haiku helped form a bond between the two.
Henderson translated every hokku and haiku into a rhymed tercet (a-b-a), whereas the Japanese originals never used rhyme.
Some of the more common practices in English are:
Use of three (or fewer) lines of 17 or fewer syllables;
Use of a season word (kigo);
Use of a cut (sometimes indicated by a punctuation mark) paralleling the Japanese use of kireji, to contrast and compare, implicitly, two events, images, or situations.
While traditional Japanese haiku has focused on nature and the place of humans in it, some modern haiku poets, both in Japan and the West, consider a broader range of subject matter suitable, including urban contexts. While pre-modern haiku avoided certain topics such as sex and overt violence, contemporary haiku sometimes deal with such themes.
The loosening of traditional standards has resulted in the term "haiku" being applied to brief English-language poems such as "mathemaku" and other kinds of pseudohaiku.