Basho: haiku poet and swaggie

Basho Museum

Matsuo Basho was born at the beginning of the Edo period in 1644 in present-day Akasaka, Ueno City, Mie prefecture. As a youngster he served the family of Todo Shinshichiro, a samurai general in charge of the Iga region. During this period he attended to Todo Yoshitada. Yoshitada, who acquired the haikai name of Sengin, enjoyed writing in verse, and as a consequence Basho also came into contact and grew fond of haikai.

However, it was only after Yoshitada passed away and Basho left the Todo family home that he decided to take the haikai path in earnest. The break from the service of the samurai family awoke Basho to the freedom of the haikai world as he set out on his new journey. At the age of 28, Basho compiled an anthology of verses in a book entitled the Kai Oi (Shell Matching), which he dedicated to the Ueno Tenjingu (Ueno Tenjin Shrine), place of the Ubusunagami (god that protects the land of one's birth).

After this Basho left for Edo (present-day Tokyo), and evolved his own haikai style. The trend at the time was to write in a comical and fanciful style, but Basho, dissatisfied with this kind of haikai, attempted his own style that would truly touch the hearts of all people, regardless of era. Subsequently, Basho began to reveal an entirely new world of haikai.

Basho began with the journey Nozarashi-Kiko (Records of the Weather-Exposed Skeleton) in 1684, followed by others, as depicted in Kashima-Kiko (Visit to the Kashima Shrine), Oi no Kobumi (The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel) and Sarashina-Kiko (A Visit to Sarashina). In 1689, Basho left his hermitage in Fukagawa and set out on another journey from the Tohoku region to the northern provinces of Honshu. It is this experience that provided material for his famous work Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Apparently, it was also during this journey that Basho began thinking in more philosophical terms about life, travel and poetry. The Narrow Road to the Deep North ended in Ogaki, Gifu prefecture, after which Basho returned to his beloved home in Iga. He moved back to Edo once more in 1691.

Three years later he set his mind once more on traveling, and set out for kyushu. Basho became ill on the way, and died in Osaka on 12th October 1694. He was 50 years of age.

Peter Neilson sent this:
'From An Introduction To Haiku by Harold G. Henderson:

In 1694 Basho died, and died as he would have wished, on one of his beloved wanderings, and surrounded by many of his friends and pupils. During his last illness he was constantlydiscussing religion and philosophy and poetry (three things that were almost one to Basho), and when it became evident that he was dying his friends asked him to give them a “death poem” - the sum of his philosophy. Basho refused, on the ground that every poem in his last ten years...had been composed as if it were a death poem. But on the next morning he called them to his bedside, saying that during the night he had dreamed, and on waking a poem hed come to him. And he gave them:

On a journey, ill,
                                   and over  fields all withered, dreams
               go wandering still.

Surely as lovely a farewell as any poet ever gave to the world.'

see http://www.uoregon.edu/~kohl/basho/index.html