…just begins. And this is the point. Being too much against philosophy is just as much an arid intellectualism as being too much for it. Basho is to the point in the most famous of all haiku. The old pond a frog jumps in plop. These lines are said to…

…is tremendously important in Japanese History because that was a time when of what you might call the democratization of culture. Basho invented haiku poetry so that everyone could be a poet, not necessarily for publication, but for one's own fun. People…

…something. This looks like it's this but it is that a haiku does this in a very cunning way. It's the simplest possible utterance. Basho said to get haiku well written, ask a three foot child to say: the robin's egg is blue. You light the fire, I'll…

…down, insipid. And these four men were in their own quite different ways geniuses at doing it. Let's start with basho. Basho didn't invent haiku poetry, but he brought it to a certain degree of development whereby it was possible for ordinary people…