Which 17th-century Japanese poet is most famous for haiku?

Matsuo Bashō is the 17th-century Japanese poet most famous for haiku. He lived from 1644 to 1694 and became the defining master of Japanese short-form poetry, although the poems now called haiku were usually known in his time as hokku.

Bashō worked within haikai no renga, a collaborative linked-verse tradition, and his hokku often combined precise natural imagery with a sense of stillness, travel and Buddhist-influenced reflection. His famous frog poem, beginning with an image of an old pond, is among the best-known examples of Japanese poetry worldwide.

Bashō was also a traveller and essayist. His travel writings, especially “Oku no Hosomichi,” or “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” helped establish the literary importance of combining prose, landscape and verse. The other names listed are also important haiku poets: Yosa Buson and Kobayashi Issa were near-contemporaries, while Masaoka Shiki lived much later and coined the modern term “haiku.”