発句

Hokku (発句) means 'starting verse' — from hok- (発, departure, start) and ku (句, verse, phrase). It was the first stanza of renga (連歌, linked verse) — a collaborative poetic form in which poets alternated verses in a chain that could last a hundred stanzas. The hokku set the season, the mood, and the imagery for the entire chain that followed. It required a kigo (季語, season word) and a kireji (切れ字, cutting word) — a break that created two juxtaposed images.

Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) was a renga master who traveled extensively through Japan and raised the hokku from a functional opening into a literary art. His famous frog poem — Furuike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto (An old silent pond / a frog jumps into the pond — / splash! silence again) — was a hokku. Bashō did not coin haiku; he wrote hokku. But his hokku were so formally complete, so imagistically precise, that his disciples began publishing them as standalone works.

The word haiku (俳句) was coined by Masaoka Shiki in the 1890s as part of a deliberate reform movement. Shiki wanted to establish the short poem as a serious independent literary form, distinct from its role as renga opener. He promoted shasei (写生, sketching from life) as a method and advocated for haiku's autonomy. The renaming was partly political — haiku was more prestigious than hokku within Shiki's reforming framework — and partly descriptive: the verse was no longer an opening; it was the whole.

Western poets encountered haiku through late 19th and early 20th century translations — Basil Hall Chamberlain published early translations in 1902, and Ezra Pound's Imagism was explicitly influenced by the form's compression. The word haiku entered English; hokku did not. The original term — starting verse, the beginning that contained everything — was superseded by the genre it produced. Bashō wrote hokku. The form he mastered became haiku.