In the sixteenth century, Zen monks in Japan developed the haiku, an unrhymed poetic form consisting of 17 syllables arranged in three lines. Now, in One Hundred Great Books in Haiku, David Bader has applied this ancient poetic form to the classics. From Homer to Milton to Dostyevsky, the great books are finally within reach of even the shortest attention spans!

The lyrical world of Chinese poetry in faithful translations by Kenneth Rexroth.

Perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most translated haiku, is Basho's poem Old pond / Frog jumps in / The sound of water. In this book, Sato has collected some 135 translations, versions, parodies, and re-creations of pond-frog-sound, from Lafcadio Hearn, Daisetz Suzuki, Donald Keene, Kenneth Rexroth, Edward Seidensticker, Robert Aitken and Allen Ginsberg. The formats range from the five-seven-five syllables of the original haiku to sonnets, limericks, prose poems, and e.e. cummings-style flights of typographical fancy. Sato's brief introduction provides background, and ink-painting frogs hop across the pages.

A compact collection of more than 500 poems from Jack Kerouac that reveal a lesser known but important side of his literary legacy “Above all, a haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi pastorella.”—Jack Kerouac Renowned for his groundbreaking Beat Generation novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac was also a master of the haiku, the three-line, seventeen-syllable Japanese poetic form. Following the tradition of Basho, Buson, Shiki, Issa, and other poets, Kerouac experimented with this centuries-old genre, taking it beyond strict syllable counts into what he believed was the form’s essence. He incorporated his “American” haiku in novels and in his correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In Book of Haikus, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich has supplemented a core haiku manuscript from Kerouac’s archives with a generous selection of the rest of his haiku, from both published and unpublished sources.

An anthology of more than 800 poems that were originally written in English by over 200 poets from around the world. This collection tells the story for the first time of Anglophone haiku, charting its evolution over the last one hundred years and placing it within its historical and literary context.

A new edition of the most widely known and popular collection of Japanese poetry. The best-loved and most widely read of all Japanese poetry collections, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu contains 100 short poems on nature, the seasons, travel, and, above all, love. Dating back to the seventh century, these elegant, precisely observed waka poems (the precursor of haiku) express deep emotion through visual images based on a penetrating observation of the natural world. Peter MacMillan's new translation of his prize-winning original conveys even more effectively the beauty and subtlety of this magical collection. Translated with an introduction and commentary by Peter MacMillan.

Basho, one of the greatest of Japanese poets and the master of haiku, was also a Buddhist monk and a life-long traveller. His poems combine 'karumi', or lightness of touch, with the Zen ideal of oneness with creation. Each poem evokes the natural world - the cherry blossom, the leaping frog, the summer moon or the winter snow - suggesting the smallness of human life in comparison to the vastness and drama of nature. Basho himself enjoyed solitude and a life free from possessions, and his haiku are the work of an observant eye and a meditative mind, uncluttered by materialism and alive to the beauty of the world around him.

No other Asian poetic form has so intrigued and beguiled the English-speaking world as the Japanese haiku. Even before World War I such imagist poets as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and John Gould Fletcher were experimenting with the form. At that time, Pound well described the haiku as "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Indeed, it is the haiku's sense of immediacy and its precision that continue to appeal to poets and poetry lovers today. In recent decades there has been an upsurge of interest in the haiku, leading to a number of critical studies of the form, studies that have now culminated in the present book. This insightful work not only considers the haiku itself but also the extremely important yet often ignored renga or linked-verse form, out of which the haiku grew. No deep understanding of the haiku is possible without familiarity with the renga. One Hundred Frogs begins with a detailed history and description of the renga and haiku. Many renowned Japanese poets, most notably Basho, are represented in the wealth of translated poetry that illustrates the text. To bring this history up to date, a discussion of modern Japanese and Western haiku is included. Next, the author discusses the craft of translating renga and haiku and explores recent developments in the two forms, offering a representative selection of modern works. To reveal the myriad choices open to translators of renga and haiku, the author provides an in-depth analysis of one of Japan's most famous haiku, Basho's poem about a frog in a pond, and presents a compilation of over one hundred translations and variations of the poem. The book closes with short anthologies of English-language renga and haiku by contemporary Western poets that offer a tantalizing glimpse of the diversity of expression possible with these two forms. An instructive celebration of the renga and haiku, this volume furnishes a new perspective on the work of some of Japan's outstanding poets of old and lays a foundation for the appreciation of the renga and haiku that are being written today.