Japanese · 1644–1694
Born to a minor samurai family near Ueno, Bashō served a young lord who died, left for Edo, and made a living teaching and judging linked verse before deciding that the popular comic style was not enough. A student gave him a banana tree, a bashō, and he took its name and moved to a hut beside it. Then he began walking. The journeys of the 1680s and 1690s took him along the northern roads, sleeping in temples and farmhouses, and produced the travel sketches that fused prose and haiku into a form nobody had used that way before. He raised the seventeen-syllable hokku from a party game to a serious poetic instrument and left a school of disciples who quarrelled about his legacy for two centuries. His last poem, dictated during his final illness in Osaka, has him dreaming across a withered field.