Matsuo Basho

Matsuo Basho was a Japanese poet of the Edo period, widely regarded as the greatest master of the haiku form, then known as hokku, and one of the most influential figures in the history of Japanese literature. Rather than remaining a court or urban poet, Basho undertook a series of extended travels on foot across Japan late in his life, blending terse, evocative poetry with prose travel writing in works such as "Oku no Hosomichi" ("The Narrow Road to the Deep North"), which recounts a roughly five-month journey through the northern provinces and remains one of the most celebrated works of Japanese travel literature. His poetry drew on Zen Buddhist sensibility and a deep attentiveness to nature and the passage of time, distilled into spare seventeen-syllable verses, of which his poem about a frog leaping into an old pond is among the most widely recognized in Japanese literary history. Basho died in 1694 while traveling, and his approach to haiku as a serious literary art, rather than a light diversion, shaped the form's subsequent development in Japan and its later reception worldwide.