SOURCE: “Matsuo Bashō: The Poetic Spirit, Sabi, and Lightness,” in Zeami, Bashō, Yeats, Pound: A Study in Japanese and English Poetics, Mouton & Co., 1965, pp. 35-64.

In the following excerpt, Ueda argues that Bashō's poetic concepts of “fragrance,” “revelation,” “reflection,” and “lightness”—which concern how the “poetic spirit” can be revealed in a poem—are manifestations of the poet's ideas about life, including his religious pessimism, pragmatic optimism, feudalistic conventionalism, and bourgeois liberalism.

Matsuo Bashō,¹ the poet who perfected the haiku as a serious art form, shows a marked resemblance to Zeami in some respects. In a sense he was a medieval poet living in a modern age. He declared his adherence to medieval Japanese poets such as Saigyō and Sōgi, and, like them, he followed the footsteps of Li Po and Tu Fu in his way of life. He was also much attracted to Buddhism, particularly...