The History of the Haiku, and How to Write One

The summer grasses,
all that remain of soldiers’
lost, heroic dreams
This is a haiku by the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, published in his travel diary Oku no hosomichi.
Bashō is celebrated as the greatest of Japan’s haiku masters. His work blends personal reflections with themes of nature and Zen Buddhism.
But what makes a poem a haiku? And where did this poetic form come from?
To be considered a haiku, a poem must have 17 syllables
arranged in three lines
of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively.
This poem follows the rules in both English and its original Japanese.
Bashō wrote this piece in the 1680s or ’90s, around the same time that the haiku form developed in Japan.
The word “haiku,” however, wasn’t popularized until the 19th century. It’s a combination of two other poetic terms: haikai—a comedic renga, or poem written collaboratively by two writers—plus hokku—the first stanza of a renga.
The hokku was traditionally three lines describing a season, a time of day, or a landscape.
If that sounds like a haiku to you…you’d be right. Haiku came into the picture when hokku were explored independently from longer poems.
Also like hokku, early haiku tended to focus on emotional depictions of the natural world.
Here, Bashō describes a lush field that grew over the ruins of a destroyed castle.
Over time, poets expanded the subject matter beyond nature, crafting haiku about anything from laundry drying to the Paris metro.
No matter the topic, haiku is about expressing as much as possible in the fewest words possible—
making the form an enticing challenge for experienced poets and first-time writers alike.
All you need to know
when you sit down to write: three
lines. Five, seven, five.