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This page lists all the active Editors who have joined the Literature Workgroup.
See also Inactive Literature Editors. (This is continuation of the article on HAIKU that I began February 14 but did not complete. Please attach this remainder of the article to the first part that you have apparently accepted and posted. Warren Collins. February 15)

    The emergence of haiku as a self-contained entity cannot be understood without reference to renga [        ] "linked poetry," a genre with origins in the twelfth century that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries became the representative poetic form, one that is still practiced today. Renga was a collaborative venture usually undertaken by a team of poets and was composed under elaborate etiquette and governed by complicated rules of composition. The team leader, normally the guest of honor, would recite the hokku "opening verse" consisting of three phrases in the five-seven-five morae pattern of waka. Next, the host would add a seven-seven morae couplet which would both complete a waka and extend or modify the meaning of the hokku. A third poet would follow with another three-phrase, seventeen-morae verse which with the preceding couplet made an entirely new five-phrase poem. A fourth poet in his turn would develop the content of the preceding three phrases with a concluding couplet, and so on, the two five-seven-five morae and seven-seven morae verses (the two parts of a waka) alternating, each complementing the previous until, as was most commonly the case, the linked sequences reached the one hundredth verse. 

    Throughout much of Japanese literary history the dictates of classical form have existed in tension with a natural tendency toward innovation. Both renga and haiku were attempts to allow poetic composition with greater freedom from traditional restraints. In the sixteenth century as literacy spread, as more and different types of people began to compose poetry, a non-standard variety of renga called haikai no renga [       ] "playful, humorous style renga" came into vogue. Haikai theory encouraged even greater disregard of the formal rules of waka and insisted on a realistic, everyday--as opposed to an idealized, aristocratic--attitude toward life. Haikai poets aimed to elicit laughter through the use of puns, parody, even vulgar subject matter. Along with this challenge to the approved content of a poem, there was a parallel tendency for the hokku, the opening verse of a renga sequence, to stand alone as a three-phrase, seventeen-morae lyric, independent of the usual completing couplet. Already as early as the fourteenth century, collections of renga had included special sections for hokku; indeed, anthologies were compiled consisting solely of hokku. 

    These two tendencies of the age came together in the poetic career of Matsuo Basho (1644-94) whose verse and innovative combinations of poetry and prose revealed the possibilities of the seventeen-morae form. 

    During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the two leading poets of the Basho Revival, Yosa Buson (1718-83) and Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), epitomized in their poetic practice the popularity of writing independent hokku over haikai no renga.

    At the end of the nineteenth century Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), the poet primarily responsible for the modern revival of haiku, argued forcefully for making a distinction between hokku as the opening verse of a poem sequence and hokku as a self-contained lyric. Shiki suggested the term haiku (not in wide use before his time) for the independent poem. As a result, it has become the practice to designate as hokku those seventeen-morae verses written before the beginning of the modern era in 1868 and to designate as haiku the seventeen-morae verses written thereafter. Thus, the three-phrase, seventeen-morae poems of Basho, Yosa, Issa and their followers are referred to as hokku while those of Shiki and modern poets are called haiku. 

    Bibliography:

Haikai and Haiku. Tokyo: Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai, 1958.

Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958.

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston [1984]

. Seeds in the Heart. New York: Henry Holt and Company [1993]

. World Within Walls. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston [1976]

Shirane Haruo. Traces of Dreams. Stanford: Stanford University Press [1998]

Ueda Makoto. Basho and His Interpreters. Stanford: Stanford University Press [1992]

. Literary and Art Theories in Japan. Cleveland: Western Reserve University [1967]

. Matsuo Basho. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc. [1970]

. The Path of Flowering Thorn. Stanford: Stanford University Press [1998]