Poetics of the natural: A study of Taoist influence on Basho

In the development of the seventeenth-century Japanese comic linked verse haikai (whose opening stanza became known as haiku), the influence of Taoist ideas was prominent. This dissertation studies the literary significance of that influence on Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), the most important contributor to the establishment of the genre as a high art.Unlike his immediate predecessors, the Teimon and Danrin haikai schools, which borrowed the writing style of the Taoist classic the Zhuangzi as a didactic or rhetorical device, Basho sought poetic inspiration from the correspondences between Taoist principles and the Chinese poetic tradition. This search led to his assertion in both his poetry and his life of the shoyoyu aesthetic, a poetic stance that related closely to the spirit of "free and easy wandering" articulated in the Zhuangzi. Living in a thatched hut and wandering throughout the country, Basho renovated the dialogic context of comic verse with a new set of themes, images and vocabulary derived from the larger aesthete-recluse tradition, specifically those surrounding the thematic centers: "poetic eccentricity" (fukyo), "elegant unconventionality" (furyu), and "idleness and tranquility" (kanjaku).Along with the maturity of the Basho-style haikai, the shoyoyu tradition, which had a remarkable impact on the thematic tendency of the Basho school in the 1680s, was given new critical significance, and on that basis Basho put forth his poetic principle to "follow nature's working and return to the Natural." Basho's poetics of the Natural greatly reduced the formalistic limitations inherited in haikai and widened the latitude for spontaneity and originality. His own poetry at its peak period created a world that is at once humorous and serious, simple and profound, conveying subtle overtones in naturalness.Tracing the internal factors in the development of haikai that underpinned Basho's interests in Taoist principles, this dissertation examines diachronically how Taoist ideas articulated in the Chinese poetic tradition are embodied in Basho's poetry and synchronically how these assumptions affected his critical thought.