The literary works of Matsuo Bash (mah-tsew-oh bah-shoh) are difficult to classify, even for those acquainted with Japanese literary history. Bash is popularly known as the greatest of allhaiku poets, although the literary form was not defined and named until two hundred years after his death. Modern collections labeled “Bash’s haiku” are generally bits and pieces taken from his travel journals and renku (linked poems). In a sense, all Bash’s literary works are broader and more complex than the seventeen-syllable haiku for which he is remembered. The seven major anthologies of his school, listed above, contain hokku (opening verses) and renku composed by Bash and his disciples, as well as an occasional prose piece. Besides hokku and renku, Bash is known for his haibun, a combination of terse prose and seventeen-syllable hokku generally describing his pilgrimages to famous sites in Japan. His best-known travel journals include Nozarashi kik (1687; The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, 1966), Oku no hosomichi (1694; The Narrow Road to the Deep North, 1933), Oi no kobumi (1709; The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, 1966), and Sarashina kik (1704; A Visit to Sarashina Village, 1957). Bash’s conversations on poetry were preserved by disciples, and his surviving letters, numbering more than a hundred, are treasured today.

Matsuo Bash is the favorite poet of Japan and one of the only poets of Asia whose verses are known popularly in the West. It is paradoxical that this complex poet whose profundity continues to tease the minds of Japan’s greatest literary critics is read and recited by schoolchildren in many lands. Although technically he never wrote a haiku, Bash serves as a model for many children, East and West, writing their first verses as haiku. The wedding of simplicity and profundity that characterizes Bash’s work provides a true measure of his stature as a poet.

The continuing popularity of Bash in his homeland, a country where laymen pride themselves on being aesthetic critics, is itself an extraordinary tribute to his work. Japanese still make pilgrimages to the stone monuments marking the stopping places on his journeys. Many recite his verses when they hear a frog splash, smell plum blossoms on a mountain trail, or hear a cicada’s shrill voice. Thanks in no small part to his work, many average citizens of Japan still write poetry, hang scrolls containing verse, and read the poetry column in Japan’s daily newspapers.

In an age when aristocrats were the arbiters of taste, setting the complex rules for the writing of waka and renga, the chief poetic forms of Japan, Bash devoted himself to haikai, an informal style of poetry celebrating the seasons of nature and the round of ordinary life among peasants and merchants. Without Bash, haikai was in danger of sliding into slavish imitation of aristocratic canons or of degenerating into a display of vulgarity, coarse humor, and puns. Bash democratized literature in Japan, and through literature, he helped democratize Japanese aesthetics. Bringing to bear his own sensitivity to the nature mysticism of Chinese Daoism and the radical sacramentalization of the ordinary in Zen Buddhism, he created a poetry of breadth and depth for the Japanese populace. As he observes in one of his hokku: “The beginning of art:/ Songs sung by those planting rice/ In the back country.”

More specifically, Bash’s achievements in literature led to the maturing of three forms: the hokku, the haikai no renga (informal linked verse), and the haibun. Devoting a lifetime of effort to hokku , those seventeen-syllable verses intended as openings for linked poems, Bash prepared the form for its modern independence as haiku. Working tirelessly...