Once confined to a literary elite in Japan, haiku are now written all over the world by poets who find their combination of brevity, technical discipline & expressive content irresistible. This collection brings together hundreds of poems by Japanese writers from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, with modern examples from Europe & America. In addition, there is a selection of poems influenced by haiku, & a section devoted to haiku-like passages from traditional English poets. The book is dominated by four great masters
- Basho, Buson, Issa & Shiki
- who between them compress the gamut of human experience into the limits of seventeen syllables.