Matsuo Bashõ

Matsuo Kinsaku (Bashō) is one of the most significant innovators of the Japanese poetic tradition. He was born in 1644 in Ueno, in the Iga Province, into a poor samurai family. At the age of twenty-nine, he moved to Edo (modern-day Tokyo), where he established himself as a teacher of haikai no renga or haikai (collective, witty, continuous verses), creating a circle of students and patrons who would later form the Bashō School. At the same time, he studied and practiced Zen Buddhism. At the height of his fame in 1680, he retreated to a hut on the outskirts of Edo, leading an ascetic life and dedicating himself to haikai, gradually establishing his personal style. A total of seven anthologies of the Bashō School were published. The poet infused haikai with aesthetic refinement, elegance, spiritual depth, and sensitivity, while maintaining humor, playfulness, and a connection to the world of everyday life. His work weaves together a deep knowledge and continuity of classical tradition with an unconventional spirit and a quest for a constantly new perspective. He highlighted the poetic autonomy of the initial seventeen-syllable verse of renga compositions (known today as haiku) and was the first great author of short texts combining poetry and prose (haibun). Without a home and material dependencies, he spent the last ten years of his life traveling through the most remote provinces of Japan in a spiritual and poetic quest, simultaneously spreading the aesthetic principles of the Bashō School. The fruit of his many years of wandering is five travel diaries of poetic prose, the most masterful of which is "Oku no Hosomichi." Bashō died in Osaka in 1694 while traveling, with weakened health, to impart his new poetic ideal for haikai to his students.