Which poet wrote 'Don't worry, spiders, I keep house casually'?

Kobayashi Issa wrote the haiku commonly translated as “Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually.” Issa is especially known for poems that find humor, sympathy, and spiritual meaning in small creatures and ordinary domestic life.

Born Kobayashi Yatarō in 1763, Issa spent much of his life in poverty and experienced repeated personal losses, including the deaths of several children. Those hardships shaped his intimate poetic voice. Unlike grand, idealized nature poetry, many of his poems look closely at insects, sparrows, frogs, and other overlooked beings, treating them as fellow sufferers and companions.

The line’s humor comes from the speaker’s deliberately relaxed attitude toward housekeeping. Instead of presenting a perfectly ordered home, the poem accepts spiders and their webs as part of lived experience. That combination of comic understatement and compassion is characteristic of Issa’s reputation.

The other choices are major Japanese poets, but they are associated with different periods and styles: Buson with painterly imagery, Shiki with modernizing haiku, and Bashō with the seventeenth-century elevation of hokku. Translation wording varies, so punctuation and line breaks may differ while the attribution remains Issa’s.