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38 have been very high, but this expansive, optimistic, and rather vulgar kind of poetry is most characteristic of late seventeenth-century Japan. After long years of internal warfare, the establishment of peace at the beginning of the century had led to a period of great prosperity and a brilliant flowering of the arts. It was natural that Japanese poetry, which had hitherto been marked chiefly by its sobriety and restraint, should become more cheerful and extravagant, and that the shift of the centre of creative activity from the court to the haunts of merchants should be reflected also in the tone. What is surprising is that there lived at this time in the capital city of the shoguns a man who is often considered Japan’s greatest poet, whose verses are of exquisite refinement, and who himself led so pure a life that he is venerated as a saint by some. This was Bashō (1644–94), the master of the free linked-verse and of the 17-syllable haiku, which was its product.

In his conversations with his disciples, Bashō declared that the two principles of his school of poetry were change and permanence. This statement is made more intelligible by a knowledge of the two perils by which Japanese poetry was always menaced. The first of these, and the graver, was staleness and sterility, the result of an excessive study and imitation of earlier masterpieces. Bashō insisted that his style of poetry should “change with every year and be fresh with every month” as he put it. He said, moreover, “I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; I seek the things they sought.” That is, he did not wish to imitate the solutions given by the poets of former times to the eternal problems, but sought instead to solve them for himself. This was what he meant by his second principle, that of permanence. When, as under the influence of the new movements in seventeenth-century literature, all traditions were cast aside, and Japanese poets revelled