Matsuo Basho
[At the first
of May, 2002, this is a work in progress--what I have so far of an essay
on Basho. But the beauty of the internet is that I can feel, "Why
not publish it, as I did that single sentence earlier? If I only
add another single sentence by next month, I can re-publish the essay in
a few seconds--flexible composition is the way of this world. It
is just easier to recognize in this context that no composition is ever
finished--that life itself is a work in progress.
Most of the
factual information has come from Makoto Ueda's Matsuo Basho
(Kodansha International: Tokyo, 1982), but I take full responsibility for
the loose handling it receives in this draft.]
Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), is Japan's most famous poet, certainly its most famous haiku poet. He was historically important in developing the form during the Genroku Period, the high point of the Japanese Renaissance, which has so much in common with the Elizabethan Period in England, which came just 100 years earlier. As Ivan Morris says, "Strictly speaking, this period lasted from 1688 to 1703, but in effect it was an entire cultural phase that reached its peak in the 1690s."
The arts in general
were burgeoning, under the "Pax Tokugawa," in the major centers of Kyoto,
Osaka, and Edo (now Tokyo), so Basho lived in a world of artists.
He is generally judged one of the big three of this period in Japanese
literature, the outstanding artist in poetry, along with Ihara Saikaku
in prose fiction and Chikamatsu Monzaemon in the drama. And, as Shakespeare
was surrounded by sonneteers in the Elizabethan Period, Basho was
surrounded by haiku poets, most of whom, for most of his life, recognized
him as the master, and, in the judgment of most critics, he has never been
surpassed in the form.
Basho was
born into a minor samurai family in Ueno, about forty miles east of Kyoto,
and, by the time of his father's death, when he was 12, was evidently already
servant to Todo Yoshitada, a young relative of the daimyo (feudal
lord) who ruled the area. They became very close, and one of the
interests they shared was poetry. There were certain critical moments
which changed the direction of Basho's life, and one of these was the death
of this young lord, after which he left Ueno for the capital city of Kyoto,
and gave up ambitions as a samurai. But at this point he had still
not committed to poetry as a profession.
Poetry gradually
became his life, however, as he worked on putting together anthologies
of the works of others, and his personal reputation as a haikai poet gradually
grew, first in Kyoto, then, over several years, after he moved to Edo.
He came to have many friends and sponsors, then many students, who three
times in his life built him the kind of small hut that he preferred to
live and work in. The first one, in Edo, was the one from which he
got his name as poet, Basho, for the famous banana tree they also planted
there. That hut burned down. Some time later they him built
another hut, which he left when he went on his longest journey, during
which he wrote the travel diary, The Narrow Road to the North,
which became his most famous publication. His students built him
another hut later--so that life style provided the basically simple but
independent form of life appropriate to, and affordable by, the poet (add
a word processor and it still seems ideal to me)--some place he could live
and work, and be visited by friends, students, and other poets. At
times, and on principle, he stopped working on poetry entirely for extended
periods of time evidently, but, for the most part, he was a very social
animal [if not a family man--was he homosexual?], working together with
other poets so frequently that he became an established, and leading, member
of this community.
And he was
also a wanderer, made several long journeys in a time when that meant walking,
and there were all kinds of dangers of the road. He might be gone
for a year or more--so maintaining a permanent home would have been difficult--but
he was almost always accompanied by or staying with friends or students.
He obviously liked to go places and see things--famous scenic views at
the right season for cherry blossom or moon viewing, for example, temples,
historical sites, particularly those associated with the journeys of famous
priests. But everywhere he went he wrote haiku--and renga, the linked
verse form that involved working with other poets in a kind of competition.
He often engaged in competitions, in fact, or judged competitions, and
edited anthologies. So he was very much a part of the literary establishment
of his day--which was that time of greatest literary achievement, the Genroku
era.
His renga
are historically important in the development of that form and the haiku.
He became
a deeply religious man, who would modify the patterns of his life based
on his evolving religious attitudes. He became committed to Zen principles,
and the older he got the more he intended his poetry to serve his spiritual
quest. The key document in this development is his Narrow Road
to the North (the Deep North, the Interior, Iku), the title of
which is meant to imply that the journey is as much interior as exterior,
in search of the soul, of spiritual truths. His earlier trips, extended
though they were, were over known ground (known by him or others), but
this was intended to be an exploration (like Conrad's Heart of Darkness?).
I like the concept.
It is said
that when Basho died he felt that he would not attain Nirvana from this
life because he had loved poetry too much (and still did).
So his soul would still need to be cleansed of that.
[Give examples
of his haiku from various periods. The effect his work had
the larger tradition, which had been a narrative tradition with poetry
(tanka) working within it, as love correspondence, for example. He
worked from renga, which was a linked form purely in verse, to haiku, which
was more personalized lyric observation, more likely to be on nature than
on love--Zen priests had been important in developing this tradition in
tanka. At his most characteristic, he embodied these personal observations
in the prose narrative of his travel journals or diaries. But he
is probably best known for individual haiku that demonstrate perception
in observation linked to mastery of the form (to make the syllables and
comment come out even in ways that made it look easy), which is more a
grammatical than a quantitative achievement.]
1Ivan
Morris's Introduction to The Life of an Amorous Woman by Ihara Saikaku
(New Directions: New York, 1963), p. 11.