https://hi.co/people/basho
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Early Life Basho was a late medieval poet who was born in the early years of the Tokugawa shogunate and he came from a village in western Japan near Lake Biwa (30 miles southwest of Kyoto). He went to Kyoto to study poetry and Zen (meditation). His name comes from a banana (or Basho) tree that was planted. He spent about 10 years in travel, sleeping at monasteries and inns, participating in poetry readings and writing sessions in villages to observe the natural world. He also visited famous historical, religious sites and natural wonders.
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The spirit of haiku required that the language be kept plain. “The function of Haiku,” Basho once said, “is to rectify common speech.” Years of his life was devoted immensely to subtle thinking about how to give resonance and depth to an image. Time and place was crucial for writers of haiku. Basho reinvented the forms of both the haiku and linked verse as they were practiced in his youth. By his early thirties he was a haiku master and professional teacher of poetry. He studied chinese poetry and Daoism and during the last nine years of his life, he remade haiku by transforming it into one of the greatest lyric forms in human culture. Basho was a very accomplished poet who died in 1694.
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Matsuo Basho's Work
From time to time In the cicada's cry An old silent pond...
The clouds give rest No sign can foretell A frog jumps into the pond,
To the moon-beholders. How soon it must die. splash! Silence again.