He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master.
--
Matsuo Bash?, Collected Haiku Theory, eds. T. Komiya & S. Yokozawa, Iwanami, 1951 (Unknown translator)Matsuo Basho
Haiku is that moment of absolute intensity when the poet's grasp of his intuition is complete,so that the image lives its own life.
Kenneth Yasuda
Stevens’s poetry makes one understand how valuable it can be for a poet to write a great deal. Not too much of that great deal, ever, is good poetry; but out of quantity can come practice, naturalness, accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and reversals of old ways, new ways, even—so that the poet can put into the poems, at the end of a lifetime, what the end of a lifetime brings him. Stevens has learned to write at will, for pleasure; his methods of writing, his ways of imagining, have made this possible for him as it is impossible for many living poets—Eliot, for instance. Anything can be looked at, felt about, meditated upon, so Stevens can write about anything; he does not demand of his poems the greatest concentration, intensity, dramatic immediacy, the shattering and inexplicable rightness the poet calls inspiration.
Randall Jarrell
They'd be no threat to me. I have a black belt in Haiku. And a black vest in the cleaners.
Tom Robbins
The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.
Matsuo Basho
It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it.
Randall Jarrell
Basho, Matsuo
Basie, Count
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