Quicknation    Basho

Images of Basho : G Y AOL AV MSN Books of Basho : B

form that would later be revised as haiku to its highest level, although in his lifetime, Bashō was renowned as a poet of i

"Matsuo" was the poet's family name, but he is usually referred to simply as "Bashō" without the surname. He was known as b, from a tree given to him by a disciple and planted near his hut. It is said that the climate was too cool for this tree to bear fruit, and that he intended the pen name to evoke the idea of a useless poet, or at least of affection for what is useless.

Alternate romanizations for Basho are rare, but can include b

He was born in Ueno, in Iga Province, near Kyoto. He was the son of a low-ranking samurai, and initially worked in the service of a local lord, Todo Yoshitada, who was only two years older than himself. They both enjoyed writing i, and Bashō's first known work dates from 1662. By 1664 his first poems were published in Kyoto. Around this time he adopted the samurai name of Munefusa. In 1666 his master died, and Bashō opted to leave home rather than to serve a new master. His father had died in 1656.

Traditionally he is thought to have lived in Kyoto for at least part of the next six years; he had poems published in several anthologies during this time. In 1672 he moved to Edo (now Tokyo). He continued to write, and by 1676 he was recognised as a master of i ("playful" linked verse of which the hokku was the first verse), publishing his own chapbook and judging poetry contests. He acquired a following of students, who built for him the first Bashō hut in the winter of 1680.

He lived much of his life in a series of huts, from which he could contemplate nature but to which he also welcomed many visitors. He made a number of long journeys on foot, which he recounted in diaries which combine poems, his artistic theories and details of his perceptions. These works were published and increased his fame as a teacher of poetry, allowing him to live on the patronage of his many students.

Bashō found his success unsatisfying, and turned to Zen meditation for solace. In the winter of 1682 the hut burned down, and his mother died early in 1683. In the winter of 1683 his disciples gave him a second hut, but he remained dissatisfied. In the autumn of 1684 he began a journey which he was later to call i—the title of a travel journal of prose and poems which he produced at the journey's end. The trip took him from Edo to Mount Fuji, to Ise, Ueno and Kyoto, before returning to Edo in the summer of 1685.

From his fast walking pace on trips, some believe that Bashō may have been a ninja. His long journeys also allowed him to observe conditions in the various provinces and hear the latest news, information of interest to the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate, which did employ ninja for such work. Bashō's birthplace in the Ueno area of Iga Province was rich in the ninja tradition, and he may have been a guard to Todo Yoshitada in his early life. However, few literary scholars take seriously the suggestion that he was a spy for the Tokugawa Shogunate.

The journey seems to have been successful in banishing some of his demons, and his writings of the next few years tell of his peaceful enjoyment of friendship and nature. He made a short journey to Kashima in the autumn of 1687, in order to observe the harvest moon there. Again he produced a journal of the excursion, i.

In the winter of that year he began his next long journey, after being given a send-off that "looked like a dignitary's departure". He passed through Ueno, Osaka, Suma, Akashi, Kyoto, Nagoya, the Japanese Alps and Sarashina, where he saw the harvest moon. The trip from Edo to Akashi is recounted in i.

Towards the end of spring, 1689, he began a more challenging excursion to the wilds of northern Honshu. Stops on this trip included the Nikko Toshogu, Matsushima, Kisakata, Yama-dera and Kanazawa, this last part of the journey passing Sado island. Again he produced a travel diary, i.

From autumn 1689 onwards, Bashō spent two years visiting friends and making short journeys around the area of Kyoto and Lake Biwa. During this period he worked on an anthology being compiled by some of his pupils—i—which expressed and followed the aesthetic principles which he had arrived at during his northern journey.

In the winter of 1691 he returned to Edo to live in his third Bashō hut, again provided by his followers. However, he did not remain alone: he took in a nephew and a woman friend, Jutei, who were both unwell, and he had a great many visitors. He complained in one letter that this left him "no peace of mind". In the autumn of 1693 he refused to see any or "lightness": a policy of non-attachment which allowed him to live in the world but to rise above its frustrations.

Bashō left Kyoto for the last time in the summer of 1694, and spent time in Ueno and Kyoto before coming to Osaka. He died there of a stomach illness, after writing his last hokku:

dl from comic verse, often written for light relief, to a serious form imbued with the spirit of Zen Buddhism. Many of his hokku were in fact the first three lines of longer i rather than standalone works, but they have been collected and published on their own many times. His work was a great inspiration to later writers such as Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki, though Shiki not only criticized Bashō but also reformed hokku according to his own tastes in the late 19th century, separating if from linked verse entirely and renaming it "haiku." Thus Shiki became the first haiku poet in history; all composers of i or simply of hokku, if one is focusing on the opening verse, which always, even if only in theory, was understood to be part of a wider linked verse context.

One of the most famous hokku attributed to Bashō (i, extolling the wordless beauty of Matsushima Bay) was actually written by a late Edo period poet, Tawarabo. Basho preferred writing on the twelfth day of the tenth month of the lunar calendar, and using i (時雨), a cold fall rain as a kigo.

Bashō travelled very widely during his life, and many of his writings reflect his experiences on his travels. His book iions of the landscape through which he travelled are interspersed with the hokku for which he is now most famous. WOW....

"There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; There is nothing you can think that is not the moon." [1]. It is different from tranquility. For example, if an old man dresses up in armour and helmet and goes to the battlefield, or in colorful brocade kimono, attending (his lord) at a banquet, [sabi] is like this old figure." [2], Stanford University Press © 1992 ISBN 0-8047-1916-0 cloth ISBN 0-8047-2526-8 pbk [457 pp. 255 hokku]