Pool is a published poet and teacher of advanced placement and international baccalaureate senior English. In this essay, Pool identifies four approaches to the understanding of Basho¯'s haiku.

Some students will approach a haiku with delight, and others with despair. A haiku is a tiny fragment that distills a moment's observation. The haiku (plural is also haiku, following Japanese linguistic practice, in which plurals of nouns are not distinguished grammatically in most situations) represents the world's briefest and most concise poetic form, and, depending on the reader's personality, it may strike one as, respectively, trivial, portentous, enigmatic, insightful, sensitive, profound, witty, or perversely nonsensical. Several characteristics of the haiku make problems of interpretation even more acute. Haiku are highly compressed and grammatically incomplete, even in the original Japanese. They contain ambiguities, puns, and evocative diction. A bewildering variety of English translations can result from the...