Matsuo Basho Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Matsuo Basho, born in 1644 in Ueno in Iga Province (present-day Mie Prefecture), emerged from a family of modest samurai status. His birth name is generally recorded as Matsuo Munefusa. As a youth he entered the service of a local aristocratic household and formed a close friendship with the young heir, Yoshitada. The two shared a passion for haikai, a playful, vernacular branch of linked verse that stood apart from the courtly renga of earlier centuries. When Yoshitada died unexpectedly, the loss unsettled Basho and loosened his ties to official service. Seeking a literary path, he left the provincial world of Iga and gravitated toward the cultural centers where poetry circles and learned salons were flourishing.

Apprenticeship and the Move to Edo
Basho studied haikai seriously in the Kansai region, absorbing lessons from established poets and critics. He is often associated with the circle around Kitamura Kigin, a learned figure who bridged classical poetics and the contemporary haikai scene and who helped orient Basho toward a disciplined, historically aware practice. Basho also encountered the lively, witty Danrin school associated with Nishiyama Soin, whose innovations brought colloquial vitality to linked verse. By the early 1670s Basho had relocated to Edo (now Tokyo), a booming city that welcomed poets, entertainers, and merchants. There he wrote, taught, and began to gather a circle of students and patrons. Among the most important early supporters was Sugiyama Sampu, a prosperous Edo townsman whose patronage offered the practical stability that literary life often lacks.

The Basho-an and the Shaping of a Voice
In the 1680s Basho retreated from the bustle of the city center to a humble hut in Fukagawa, a marshy district across the Sumida River. A disciple planted a banana tree beside the hut; the plant, called basho in Japanese, became a local emblem and furnished the poet with his enduring pen name. From the Basho-an, as the hut came to be known, he taught, wrote, and hosted poetry gatherings. He refined a style that deepened the quicksilver wit of earlier haikai into something spare, resonant, and contemplative. The famous hokku beginning with the old pond and the sound of water was composed in this period and captures the poise and concentration he sought. Around him clustered students who would extend and record his teaching: Takarai Kikaku, known for elegance and urban polish; Hattori Ransetsu, whose sensitivity and restraint aligned with the master's sobriety; and Sugiyama Sampu, who continued as a steadfast patron and poet.

Journeys and the Craft of Haibun
Restless and intent on renewing his sensibility, Basho took to the road. His travels became the occasion for prose diaries interleaved with verse, a hybrid form later called haibun. The first major journey, in the mid-1680s, produced a record often translated as Record of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, its title a nod to the vulnerability and austerity he courted on the road. Brief excursions followed, including a visit to the Kashima Shrine and a pilgrimage toward Sarashina, each rendering landscape, history, and personal movement in a distilled voice. In 1689 he set out with Kawai Sora, a devoted disciple, on the long northern journey later known as The Narrow Road to the Deep North. They moved through the mountains and coastal regions of the northeast, stopping at sites long sanctified by poets and monks. The ruin-strewn precincts of Hiraizumi prompted the celebrated lines on summer grasses and the dreams of ancient warriors; the stony hush at Yamadera summoned a moment of intense stillness marked by the penetrating cry of cicadas. Sora kept his own diary, offering a chronicle that both complements and corroborates the poetic travelogue. The journey concluded months later in central Japan, and Basho spent subsequent years reshaping his notes into the finished work, a text that would come to define poetic travel writing.

Circles of Disciples and Collaborative Practice
Although many remember Basho for compact solitary verses, he was deeply engaged with the collaborative art of linked verse, then called haikai no renga or renku. His salons brought together a diverse company whose talents he refined through exacting critique. In Edo he relied on the energy and publication skills of Takarai Kikaku and the support of Sugiyama Sampu. In Osaka he worked closely with Nozawa Boncho, a physician-poet whose deftness in composition helped anchor gatherings there. In Kyoto he found a trusted ally in Mukai Kyorai, whose house (the Shido-an) became a hub for composition and discussion; Kyorai later recorded important statements of Basho's poetics. Morikawa Kyoriku further extended the network in the western provinces, while Hattori Ransetsu served as a careful steward of the master's ethos. From these circles emerged anthologies such as Sarumino (Monkey's Raincoat), a milestone of linked-verse craft that showcased the mature, textured voice of the school. The presence of Kawai Sora as companion and diarist on the northern journey and as a writer in his own right testifies to the tight weave of practice, companionship, and documentation that sustained Basho's art.

Poetics: From Sabi to Karumi
Basho's achievement rests on a reconfiguration of haikai's resources. In his era the opening verse of a linked sequence, the hokku, was prized for its autonomy and polish. Later generations would elevate the hokku into the independent genre called haiku, but in Basho's practice it remained a gateway to collaboration and a seed for larger structures. He pursued an ideal sometimes glossed as sabi, a patina of loneliness and age that opens the scene to depth, and advocated a balance between the perennial and the timely, known as fueki ryuko. He engaged classical Chinese poetry, medieval Japanese waka, and the itinerant lyric of the monk Saigyo, and he steeped himself in Buddhist and Daoist thought, not as rigid doctrine but as a sensitizing presence. In his later years he began to stress karumi, or lightness: a poised simplicity that would not abandon depth but would avoid mannered heaviness. This shift stirred debate among his followers, especially those drawn to the rhetorical verve of the Danrin heritage, but Basho framed lightness as a culmination rather than a retreat, an art that seems natural because it is fully mastered.

Teaching, Editing, and Community
Basho's authority did not rest on solitary inspiration alone; it was forged in classrooms, critiques, and editorial labor. He presided over renku sessions in which the sequence's flow mattered as much as any one verse. He taught students to look hard at the ordinary and to keep diction clean, seasonal feeling precise, and pivots between verses surprising yet inevitable. He contributed prefaces, headnotes, and evaluations to miscellanies assembled by his followers, thereby shaping both the public face and private discipline of the school. When conflicts arose, as they sometimes did among ambitious poets, he counseled humility and sincerity, steering younger writers such as Kikaku, Kyorai, Boncho, Ransetsu, Kyoriku, and Sora toward a craft anchored in attentiveness rather than display.

Final Years and Death
In the early 1690s, drawn again to the road and to the western centers of poetry, Basho journeyed through Kyoto and Osaka, visiting disciples and testing the path of karumi. The travel and strain, and perhaps the very density of obligations within his widening network, took a toll. In 1694 he fell ill in Osaka while still engaged in teaching and compilation. Attended by students and friends, he composed a final hokku in which he described himself as sick on a journey, the landscape of withered fields drifting through his dreams. He died later that year. His followers preserved his manuscripts, memories, and letters, securing the textual basis for his reputation.

Legacy
Basho's afterlife in letters proved vast. His travel prose established a compact, interleaved form that later writers would emulate. His renku leadership and anthologies fixed a standard for collaborative verse, and his hokku became the touchstone for what modern readers call haiku. Disciples such as Mukai Kyorai, Takarai Kikaku, Nozawa Boncho, Morikawa Kyoriku, Hattori Ransetsu, Sugiyama Sampu, and Kawai Sora transmitted his teaching across regions, while critical notes and diaries from that circle keep his voice audible beyond the poems. Later masters of short verse looked back to him for authority, finding in his work a double motion: a turn toward the unadorned things of the world and a turn inward toward composure. The banana plant by his hut gave him a name; his journeys, friendships, and the discipline he demanded of words gave him a school and a tradition. Out of modest rooms and long roads he fashioned an art that made the fleeting endure, the common luminous, and the collaborative genuinely communal.

Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written by Matsuo, under the main topics: Wisdom - Poetry - Letting Go - Journey.

• 1702 The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Book)
• 1691 Sarumino (Monkey's Raincoat) (Collection)
• 1684 Nozarashi Kiko (Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton) (Book)