In the past hundred years, haiku has gone far beyond its Japanese origins to become a worldwide phenomenon—with the classic poetic form growing and evolving as it has adapted to the needs of the whole range of languages and cultures that have embraced it. This proliferation of the joy of haiku is cause for celebration—but it can also compel us to go back to the beginning: to look at haiku’s development during the centuries before it was known outside Japan. This in-depth study of haiku history begins with the great early masters of the form—like Basho, Buson, and Issa—and goes all the way to twentieth-century greats, like Santoka. It also focuses on an important aspect of traditional haiku that is less known in the West: haiku art. All the great haiku masters created paintings (called haiga) or calligraphy in connection with their poems, and the words and images were intended to be enjoyed together, enhancing each other, and each adding its own dimension to the reader’s and viewer’s understanding. Here one of the leading haiku scholars of the West takes us on a tour of haiku poetry’s evolution, providing along the way a wealth of examples of the poetry and the art inspired by it.

Product Description: In Haiku, the Gentle Art of Disappearing, a renowned Irish poet shows us how haiku may be used as a powerful tool for spiritual interpenetration. This implies that we divest ourselves of the ever-chattering mind, shed the voracious ego and enjoy momentary glimpses of unity with natural phenomena...read more

Product Description: This book examines the genesis and development of haiku in Japan and traces the impact haiku has made on modernist poetics.

Product Description: Now back in print, this important guide written by an established expert introduces haiku and related poetry while explaining the essential role of the seasons using examples from around the world.William J. Higginson is a former president of the Haiku Society of America and the author of numerous haiku collections...read more

Shares examples of haiku, the brief Japanese poetry form, explains its construction, and offers tips on composing one's own poem

Shares examples of haiku, the brief Japanese poetry form, explains its construction, and offers tips on composing one's own poem

An exploration of the traditional Japanese three-line poem examines the art form's history and explains how images and moments are captured in seventeen syllables.

A former Buddhist monk presents haiku poetry as a writing meditation and teaches readers how to write their own poetry through simple exercises, inspirations, and examples of haiku written by novice poets as well as great masters. Reprint.

Product Description: Basho (1644-94) is perhaps the best known Japanese poet in both Japan and the West, and yet there has been remarkably little serious scholarship in English on his achievement. This book is intended to address that virtual void by establishing the ground for critical discussion and reading of a central figure in Japanese culture, placing the works of Basho and his disciples in the context of broader social change...read more

Product Description: A Romantic look at Zen poetry examining the historical situation and developments in Japan and pointing out parallels between English Romanticism and the poetics of the Kambun and Genroku periods, and especially the "shomon" poets of the Japanese 17th century...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

An exploration of the traditional Japanese three-line poem examines the art form's history and explains how images and moments are captured in seventeen syllables.

An international anthology featuring haiku poems from forty-five nations presents some one thousand examples of these stylized poems, appearing in both English and their original language and organized according to seasonal themes. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Brand new condition hardcover book in its also brand new condition decorative dustjacket. Enjoy being the first to read this book!

Product Description: Haiku at its best is an art in which the poet takes a natural, most ordinary event, and without fuss, ornament or inflated words makes of it a rare moment — sparely rendered, crystallized into a microcosm which reveals transcendent unity...read more

Product Description: Poetry. Asian Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Leith Morton. Kusano Shinpei (1903-1988) is one of Japan's mostdistinguished and innovative poets, full of the same kinds of brevity, inventiveness and surprising turns of phrase that distinguish the work of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...read more

Product Description: No other Asian poetic form has so intrigued and beguiled the English-speaking world as the Japanese haiku. Even before World War I such imagist poets as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and John Gould Fletcher were experimenting with the form...read more

Product Description: Many lovers of poetry consider haiku to be literature's most subtle art form. The whole of life seems effortlessly expressed in only a few words and images. The book presents readers with sixty of the more famous classical haiku in the original romanized Japanese along with their interlinear transliterations...read more

Explores the meaning and cultural background of the ancient poetic genre, noting the English poet's difficulties in adopting the poetic techniques and three-line form devised by the Japanese