An epigrammatic Japanese verse form of three short lines

Usage examples of haiku.

No criticism is intended of the Meiji haijin, whose haiku are of extreme power.

But their adjustments of the haiku, valid and profoundly moving as they were, the Japanese public in general found almost incomprehensible.

The haiku, always intended to be of the widest, of universal interest, was becoming possible only to a smaller and smaller group of people who wrote more and more just for one another to read.

Shiki began to look for a simplified manner of haiku, one which would not demand the great powers of mind required for the Tokugawa style, but which would somehow continue the essential character of the haiku itself.

By the pillow, jotted down on a piece of paper were his last haiku, written during the final moments of his life - indeed the handwriting on the paper copy grows feebler towards its close.

The larger joke is in the way the haiku burlesques statements found in Buddhist biographies, that while lotuses were in flower some person dying obtained birth in the Amida Paradise, Sukhavati.

He also begins intensive reading of Tokugawa haiku gathering together a vast collection of the haiku extracted from these books.

February - Consults the famous novelist Rohan, also a student of the haiku, about the novel, and as a consequence determines to devote his efforts towards the haiku.

December 1 - Becomes a regular writer on haiku and literary matters for the Nihon Shimbun, a large newspaper.

Initiates his great work on behalf of the haiku in the public press in association with Meisetsu, Shou and others.

Shiki begin in Matsuyama a magazine of the haiku dedicated to his teaching, which they call Hototogisu.

Begins to issue a collection of the new haiku of his school chosen by him and arranged in four volumes under the titles, Ham, Natsu, Aki, Fuyu -Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter.

It is a species of cuckoo, but its note, so often mentioned in haiku and in other forms of Japanese poetry, is not what this seems to imply.

In the grasp of the import of this conception lies the attainment of the vitality of the haiku that Shiki possessed.

Shikoku, and in the country of Tosa which is neighbor to the country of Iyo he taught a kind of simplified form of the haiku which did not require the long training of the strict haiku.