The Haiku

A short Japanese lyric form, conventionally described as three phrases totaling seventeen sound units in a five-seven-five pattern, that developed from the opening stanza (hokku) of the longer collaborative renga verse form and became an independent form in its own right through the seventeenth-century work of Matsuo Basho. Classical haiku convention calls for a kigo, a word or phrase marking the season, and a juxtaposition of two images left for the reader to connect rather than explained by the poet. The form's adaptation into English and other languages from the early twentieth century onward, prized by Imagist poets for its compression, often loosens the strict syllable count, since a Japanese sound unit and an English syllable are not equivalent units.