Matsuo-Basho
(1644–1694)

Matsuo-Basho was born near Kyoto, Japan. Although he is often acknowledged as the most famous of the Japanese haiku poets, he was not known for haiku in his own day. He was a master of a type of long, linked poem called a regna and traveled around the country teaching people how to write regna. A regna could consist of one hundred stanzas or more and was usually the work of two, three, or more poets in collaboration. The haiku evolved from the "starting Verse" of a regna. Basho believed that a poet must express the nature of an object.

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